I am a postdoctoral neuroscience researcher at the University of Basel (Flavio Donato lab) and a researcher at NYU (Dan Sanes lab). I work with machine learning methods and neural recordings from rodents to investigate the relationship between neural activity and natural behavior. My research goals are to create objective paradigms for investigating voluntary behaviour in rodents in order to address millennia old questions of free will in complex organisms.
My main interests are to transform lay intuitions about free will into operationalizable terms that can be used to objectively describe and quantify spontaneous and voluntary behaviour. For example, rather than debating subjective experiences underlying free decisions in humans, I propose focusing on quantifying how free decisions can be predicted from behaviour or neural activity. In such objective paradigms we can use rodents and obtain anatomical, functional and behavioural data during free decision making not be available in humans for the foreseeable future.
I am also interested in computational neurolaw which is an emerging field combining statistical and data sciences with neuroscience advances to create policies and legal concepts that are better informed.