Nate Miska

Nate is currently a senior research associate in the Mrsic-Flogel and Hofer labs and is also part of the International Brain Lab (IBL) collaboration. He has been studying how sensorimotor transformation and prior evidence are encoded and executed within the cortico basal ganglia midbrain circuit using a combination of optogenetic manipulation and acute Neuropixels electrophysiology in mice. Nate completed his PhD in 2018 in the lab of Prof. Gina Turrigiano at Brandeis University, where he studied synaptic and small circuit-level plasticity using acute brain slice electrophysiology and optogenetics techniques.

Nate is now shifting toward bridging architectural/computational features of systems neuroscience with frontier artificial intelligence (AI), particularly to better understand how emergent behaviors such as introspection, theory of mind, and affective processing may be unfolding within these systems. He is also interested in characterizing putative features of consciousness in artificial systems and exploring the increasingly nuanced and critical ethical implications that conscious or conscious-like AI presents to society at large.