Tzuhsuan Ma

Tzuhsuan Ma is a Ph.D. student at the Center for Learning and Memory at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is supervised by Ila Fiete. Coming from a background in physics, Tzuhsuan has broad interests in the fields of photonics, condensed-matter physics, and quantum optics. He joined Dr. Fiete’s lab in 2016 and started working on computational and theoretical neuroscience. His current research interests include understanding why place cells and grid cells encode spatial information in particular neural codes; unraveling the network mechanism that underlies place-cell and grid-cell dynamics; and understanding in general the dynamics of learning and memory in the brain. To attack these problems and to gain new insights, he uses machine-learning techniques to train a recurrent neural network on navigation tasks and later study its connectivity, which is largely inaccessible in a real neural system.