Members

Geoffrey Ngo

Postdoctoral Associate, Department of Physiology and Pharmacology
Co-supervised by Dr. Taylor Schmitz

Geoffrey’s research focuses on using fast fMRI to examine brain activity during both task and rest paradigms, with the aim to understand neural dynamics. His main interests involve the development of software and novel analytical tools for the analysis of fast fMRI data. Before joining the lab, he completed his Ph.D. in Medical Biophysics at Western University, where his research emphasis was on the use of manifold learning for analyzing resting-state fMRI data.

Reebal Rafeh

PhD student, Neuroscience Graduate Program
Co-supervised by Dr. Taylor Schmitz and Dr. Ali Khan

Reebal’s research focuses on the interaction between incoming visual signals and internal task states. His projects use advanced functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques to examine how selective attention affects visual population codes. Before joining the lab, Reebal completed his MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Maastricht.

Ehsan Tousi

PhD student, Neuroscience Graduate Program
Co-supervised by Dr. Mark Daley

Ehsan studies how we learn to make sense of the outside visual world. His project examines how learning goals affect representation learning in deep convolutional neural networks, and identifies which learning goals lead to human-like object representations. Ehsan completed two MSc degrees before joining the PhD program: Communication Systems Engineering at Shahid Beheshti University and Neuroscience at Western University.

Jinkang (Derrick) Xiang

PhD student, Neuroscience Graduate Program
Co-supervised by Dr. Julio Martinez-Trujillo and Dr. Lyle Muller

Derrick aims to integrate computational and neuroscience approaches to better understand how neural computations in prefrontal cortex support human perception, cognition and action. His current project involves assessing the feasibility of measuring prefrontal population codes with advanced functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques by characterizing their spatiotemporal scale. Before joining the lab, Derrick obtained his BEng in Computer Science and BSc in Mathematics from Sichuan University, China.

Chelsea Kim

PhD student, Neuroscience Graduate Program
Co-supervised by Dr. Ken McRae

Chelsea’s research aims to elucidate how we learn about object animacy. She wants to understand how the infant brain represents the distinction between living and nonliving objects and which aspects of an object — visual appearance, biological motion, or agentic (goal-directed, non-random) motion — are necessary for learning about animacy. She uses self-supervised deep neural networks as computational models of object learning. Prior to joining the lab, Chelsea completed her MSc in Computational Systems Neuroscience at McGill University.

Haider Al-Tahan

MSc student, Neuroscience Graduate Program

Haider aims to develop biologically inspired artificial intelligent systems for object recognition. He uses a two-pronged approach: he studies how the brain solves object recognition to build more efficient artificial intelligence algorithms, and by advancing the algorithms, he intends to discover models that explain human brain activity and behaviour. Before joining the lab, Haider completed his MSc in Computer Science at Western University.

Personal website

Justin Zhou

MSc student, Neuroscience Graduate Program

Justin is interested in the interaction between the sensorimotor and visual systems. He is studying how active perception may facilitate object learning. Before starting his master’s program, he completed his BSc in Psychology at Western University.

Farzad Shayanfar

Volunteer

Farzad joined the lab as a volunteer, working on 3D stimulus creation and augmentations using a variety of software packages and 3D libraries including Unreal and Unity engines. He also works on automated large scale 3D dataset creation, data preprocessing and utility solutions to measure neural network performance in 3D environments. Farzad completed his MSc in Neurophysiology at Shahid Beheshti University and has work experience as a research assistant at the IPM. He works as a freelance programmer and 3D designer in Iran.

Aedan Yue Li, BrainsCAN Postdoctoral Fellow (2023)

Daria Proklova, Postdoctoral Fellow (2021-2022)

Aida Mirebrahimi, MSc student in Computer Science (2022-2023)

Geetika Gupta, MSc student in Neuroscience (2019-2021)

Megan Arsenault, BSc student, Honours Specialization in Psychology (2021)

Cem Torun, BSc student, Western USRI Program (2020)

Cheng Chen, BSc student, Honours Specialization in Computer Science (2020)

Aadam Ali, BSc student, Honours Specialization in Computer Science (2020)

Jason Chung, BSc student, Honours Specialization in Computer Science (2020)