Lab Members

Mary graduated with her B.S. in Animal Science from the University of Missouri, Columbia in 2017 where her studies focused on using swine models from human research. In 2019, she graduated with her M.S. in Animal Science from The Ohio State University where her research focused on animal behavior, welfare, and health; specifically, finding practical pain management options for livestock. Soon after graduation, she joined the Ponce lab where they first started at Washington University in St. Louis. She is excited to continue working with the Ponce lab as they transition to Harvard Univerity. Mary has a passion for research, a fondness for all creatures, and a love for the outdoors. In her spare time, she enjoys hiking, playing sports, gardening, and spending time with her friends and family.

I would like to understand how neural networks compute and represent visual information.  I am more familiar with artificial neural networks in computer vision, but collaboration with the Ponce Lab will teach me the biology of vision.  I am excited to make connections between these two perspectives and help support their burgeoning symbiotic relationship.  My background is in computer science with a B.S. from the University of Louisiana.  I am pursuing a M.S. in computer science at Louisiana State University.

Sam graduated from Cornell University with a BFA and a Minor in Architecture in May 2021. He is a multimedia artist exploring perception's role in the creative process and in conveying and understanding the intrapersonal experience. Sam conceptualizes future possibilities and questions regarding direct expression of thought. Inspired by the visual language of pattern recognition, he references pareidolia, surreal automatism, dreams, and artificial neural networks in his practice.

Olivia Rose is a fifth-year doctoral student in the Ponce Lab, through which her graduate training spans both Washington University School of Medicine (Ph.D. Candidate in Neuroscience) and Harvard Medical School (Visiting Research Fellow).  Grounded by neuroanatomy, Olivia's research concentrates on neurons in regions traditionally neglected in vision research, such as ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and basolateral amygdala.  She uses novel computational and behavioral paradigms to identify how neurons in these areas encode visual information, with a long-term goal of elucidating a more complete understanding of the neural systems underlying core object recognition.  Olivia received her B.S. in Psychology from Florida State University, where she fell in love with sensory neuroscience, electrophysiology, and computational modeling.  Outside of lab, she spends her free time crocheting, making homemade jam and bread, mentoring young women in STEM, and hiking with her dog, Rusty.

I'm Binxu Wang, a graduate student in the Neuroscience program (at Washington University). I got my undergrad training in theoretical physics at Yuanpei College in Peking University, and I was working with computational neuroscientist Louis Tao. Deeply enchanted by the beauty and power of geometry in Theoretical Physics, I believe it will play an important role in understanding the neural code. Currently, I'm trying to leveraging tools from geometry, optimization, and machine learning to study the visual brain. I'm interested in understanding the visual representations in the monkey brain, neural networks, and generative models. I believe that the union of theory, computation, and experiments will advance our understanding of the brain and mind. 

When not in lab, I do some fun coding projects, read novels, and make 3d art!

Victoria is a Ph.D candidate student in Computer Science and she is dedicated to the study of human and machine intelligence and vision. Her research sets out to identify brain-wide visual organizing principles and determine if these principles are shared by learning-based models of the ventral stream (convolutional neural networks, CNNs). Victoria received her B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science and B.S. in Electrical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. When not in the lab, she enjoys water-color painting, hiking and teaching her cockatiel Ashe singing and cool tricks.