PI

Manuel Schottdorf, Ph.D.

Manuel studied physics before completing a Ph.D. at Max Planck in Germany and a Postdoc at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. He enjoys developing scientific instrumentation and won numerous awards over the years, among them a Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds PhD Fellowship, an Otto Hahn medal, and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund’s Career Award. In addition to science, Manuel’s interests include labor rights and he was an organizing committee member for the postdoc union at Princeton.    Send Manuel an e-mail.

The team

Mubariz Mohammed

Mubariz is a second year PhD student in the lab. His research broadly focuses on visual processing and decision making in the mouse visual cortex. In the lab, he performs survival surgeries, including cranial window implantation and viral injections, and trains mice on virtual reality visual decision making tasks such as the Towers task. He also enjoys the technical side of neuroscience, including building, aligning, and working with two-photon microscopes, as well as developing and maintaining databases for behavioral and imaging experiments. He previously earned a Master’s degree in Computational Data Science from the University of California, Riverside. Outside the lab, Mubariz enjoys hiking and camping, exploring new cities and cuisines, and learning about different cultures.

Ethan Castanon

Ethan Castanon is a Psychological & Brain Sciences Ph.D. student in the Schottdorf Lab with a foundation in psychology. His prior work focused on ocular behavior and eye-tracking in humans, which shaped his current focus on how animals explore and map their environments using a systems neuroscience approach. Aside from Ethan’s research, he loves to draw, play the electric guitar, and video games.

Gayathri Kotti

Gayathri is an undergraduate student studying neuroscience and physics at the University of Delaware. In the Schottdorf Lab, she is currently working on computational approaches to perception and generalization, including analyzing behavioral confusion matrices and modeling pairwise similarity structures. Her current interests include how psychological distance can be inferred from observed behavior and how these quantitative models can help explain perception and learning. Outside of research, Gayathri is an Indian classical dancer and loves to read classic literature.

Ryan Kirstein

Ryan Kirstein is an undergraduate in the Schottdorf lab, majoring in psychology with a minor in Human Development and Family Sciences. Ryan is currently working with the mice to get them to vocalize at ultrasonic frequencies by themselves. Besides research Ryan plays rugby for the University of Delaware

Alums

Dr. SuHyeong Kim, Ph.D. Now with Blackrock Neurotech as a Translational R&D Engineer.

Kathleen Higgins, Now undergrad at Georgetown as a Goldwater Scholar.

Lindsey Wang, Now graduate student at Northwestern U.