Postdoctoral researcher - NOMIS Fellow

Christopher Currin is a NOMIS Fellow at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), working closely with the research groups of Tim Vogels (Computational Neuroscience and Neurotheory) and Gaia Novarino (Genetic and Molecular Basis of Neurodevelopmental Disorders).

His project, Unlocking Crucial Cortical Connections in Human Neural Dynamics for Health and Disorder, in collaboration with the Vogels lab, will utilize recordings from high-density multi-electrode arrays (HD-MEAs), monitoring thousands of neurons simultaneously from human-induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived cultures that are developed in the Novarino lab at ISTA. Using these recordings, Currin and colleagues will guide the future of model development by building human data-driven biological neural network models. Employing advanced genetic and computational techniques, the researchers aim to determine how neurons connect and maintain their connections to form functional networks. This collaborative work will help to reveal the differences between natural and disease dynamics and contribute to effective lifelong clinical treatments for “plasticity pathologies” such as epilepsy and ASD.

• Analysing and modelling trillions of spikes from human neurons derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) and recorded on high-density micro-electrode arrays (HD-MEA).
• Estimating uncertainty of biological neural networks using LSTM-based and feedforward artificial neural networks, Random Forest classification, K-means clustering, dimensionality reduction techniques (e.g. PCA), information theory, and Bayesian inference.
• Creating a custom data extract-transform-load (ETL) pipeline run locally or in the cloud, and connected to an interactive dashboard for collaborators to scale their neuroscience experiments.
• Selling the software IP to enable diagnostics and drug discovery for personalised medicine of people with epilepsy and autism spectrum disorder.
• This work has produced 3 peer-reviewed publications in top journals.