Iris Stone

I am a fifth year graduate student at Princeton University pursuing a Ph.D. in Neuroscience, with a particular interest in quantitative and computational approaches to neuroscience.  I am also pursuing a supplemental graduate Certificate in Statistics and Machine Learning (CSML) and am a member of the Quantitative Neuroscience Training Program (QNTP). 

My PhD advisors are Jonathan Pillow and Ilana Witten. Broadly speaking, I am interested in using statistical modeling and machine learning to quantify animal behaviors and their associated neural dynamics. My current work involves using latent variable models to identify the discrete structures underlying complex cognitive processes ranging from decision-making to exploration and social interaction in mice.

I earned my B.S. in Physics from George Mason University in December 2017. While there, I worked as a research assistant in the Vora Lab, studying the optoelectronic properties of a range of organic and nano-materials. During the summer of 2017, I participated in an NSF REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) at UCLA, where I spent 10 weeks working in the W.M Keck Center for Neurophysics.

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News:

March 2023: I will be presenting a poster on my work “Spectral learning of Bernoulli linear dynamical systems models for decision-making” at COSYNE and giving a talk in the workshop “What I cannot create I do not understand: analyzing neural and behavioral data with generative models“
March 2023: My second (co) first author paper, “Spectral learning of Bernoulli linear dynamical systems models for decision-making” is now up as a pre-print on arXiv.
July 2022: I’ve received the National Research Service Award (NRSA) for predoctoral students (F31) from the National Institutes of Health (Impact Score: 16, Percentile: 4.0)
May 2022: I’m excited to head out to San Francisco this summer for an internship at Herophilus, a startup focused on curing complex brain disease using human brain models, scaled biology, and machine learning
March 2022: My first (co) first author paper, “Opponent control of behavior by dorsomedial striatal pathways depends on task demands and internal state” is now out in Nature Neuroscience
February 2022: A paper I co-authored, “Mice alternate between discrete strategies during perceptual decision-making” is now out in Nature Neuroscience
March 2020: I will be presenting a poster on my work, “Latent-state models reveal a state-dependent contribution of the striatum to decision-making” at COSYNE and have also received a student travel grant to support the trip
April 2019: I’ve been accepted into the Marine Biological Laboratory’s Brains, Minds, and Machines (BMM) summer course, which I will attend for three weeks this August in Woods Hole, Massachusetts