Dr. Daniel Levenstein

I'm a postdoctoral researcher working jointly with Blake Richards and Adrien Peyrache. My work focuses on the use of offline, or “spontaneous", activity to support learning in biological and artificial neural networks. I use biologically inspired neural network models and neural data analysis, and work closely with experimental collaborators. My current research aims to understand how self-organized “replay” of waking experience is generated during sleep, and how it is used to consolidate memories in the hippocampal-neocortical system. My hope is that mimicking this process in artificial neural networks can be mutually beneficial to both neuroscience and AI.

Before coming to McGill/Mila, I got my bachelors in Biochemistry with a minor in Physics at Northeastern University, during which I worked in the lab of Dr. Chenghua Gu at Harvard. I then got my Masters in Biophysics at Cornell University where I studied the electrophysiological properties of the receptor ion channel P2X7 under Dr. Toshi Kawate. I did my PhD in Neural Science at New York University studying the neural dynamics of sleep with John Rinzel and György Buzsáki.

I’m also interested in Philosophy of Science, especially the use of models in neuroscience and how mechanistic and normative modeling approaches work together to understand how neural systems perform various functions.

I enjoy hiking, board games, weird music, and a good book.