Nick Steinmetz

Nick Steinmetz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Structure at the University of Washington, a member of the International Brain Laboratory, and Program Coordinator for the Neuropixels Consortium. Nick's research focuses on the neural mechanisms of visual perception, cognition, and action in distributed circuits across the brains of mice. Nick's lab approaches these topics with a combination of large-scale electrophysiology, calcium imaging, optogenetics, and mechanistic modeling. As a post-doc at University College London with Matteo Carandini and Kenneth Harris, Nick participated in the development of Neuropixels technology and used it to study the neural coding of vision, choice, and action across dozens of brain regions. For his graduate work, Nick studied the neural circuits underlying visual spatial attention in non-human primates at Stanford University with Tirin Moore and Kwabena Boahen. In the long term, Nick hopes that his work will help uncover the quantitative laws governing the coordination of information processing across diverse systems within the mammalian brain, with applications to the treatment of disorders such as schizophrenia and epilepsy, and to the development of end-to-end artificial intelligence.