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3. Postdoctoral Program - MSRI

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REPORT FROM MENTOR<br />

June 2010<br />

Year end report 2009/2010 for Christopher Hillar<br />

I am meeting with Chris on a weekly basis and follow his progress closely. In the first<br />

year, Chris has made great progress in acquiring a large base of knowledge about<br />

computational/theoretical neuroscience. He was quickly able to immerse in the language<br />

of theoretical/computational neuroscience, to identify mathematical problems in<br />

neuroscience and to apply his mathematics expertise to tackling them. Chris is currently<br />

involved in various research projects, in many of them as the lead scientist. He presented<br />

his project on adaptive compressed sensing on the ICASSP 2010 conference and he has a<br />

NIPS paper under review and a manuscript of a journal paper in preparation. Adaptive<br />

compressed sensing is a new theory for understanding how self-organized learning<br />

principles can enable communication across axonal fiber bundles between different brain<br />

regions. It is a perfect example for Chris' abilities to bring mathematical concepts to<br />

neuroscience, thereby opening up new routes towards identifying computations<br />

performed by the brain. Chris has given many talks about his recent work at UC Berkeley<br />

and other universities and he has given several lectures about mathematical methods to<br />

the neuroscientists at the Redwood Center. Already in this first year, Chris contributions<br />

to the Redwood center have been extraordinary. His exquisite and broad mathematical<br />

knowledge, his curiosity in new scientific problems, his ability to communicate across<br />

disciplinary borders and his didactic skills make him ideally suited for building<br />

successfully his career in theoretical neuroscience.

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