Mario Dipoppa, PhD

Mario Dipoppa is an Assistant Professor of Computational Neuroscience in the Department of Neurobiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Dr. Dipoppa seeks to understand the neural mechanisms underlying cortical brain functions. He obtained his Ph.D. from Pierre and Marie Curie University, where he developed neural circuit models of working memory under the guidance of Boris Gutkin. He then undertook postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Kenneth Harris and Matteo Carandini at University College London (UCL), where he was a recipient of the Marie Curie Fellowship. As a postdoc, Dr. Dipoppa combined large-scale neural recordings with computational models to study the mouse visual system. He later served as an Associate Research Scientist at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University under the mentorship of Ken Miller, where he integrated deep learning with dynamical systems methods to investigate fundamental properties of visual computation.

Dr. Dipoppa’s Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience Laboratory continues to investigate how neural networks and dynamics in the cerebral cortex give rise to neural computations. Although cortical circuits perform complex operations, their structures are stereotyped, which may support common computational principles underlying these operations. To uncover these principles, Dr. Dipoppa’s lab combines biologically realistic neural networks, artificial neural networks (such as deep and recurrent architectures), and analyses of the neural code.

Research Interests

• Computational Neuroscience
• Machine Learning
• Neural Networks
• Neural Coding
• Neural Dynamics
• NeuroAI