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Research Staff

Joshua Pughe-Sanford, Ph.D.

Flatiron Research Fellow, Center for Computational Neuroscience

Website
jpughesanford.github.io

Bio

 

Joshua Pughe-Sanford is a Flatiron Research Fellow in the Center for Computational Neuroscience. They work on a dynamical systems framework of neurons, with a particular focus on the reconstruction of dynamics from sparse measurements and reduced-order modeling. Pughe-Sanford graduated from Georgia Tech in 2023 with a Ph.D. in physics and an M.S. in mathematics. Their dissertation explored extending the dynamical systems theory of Axiom-A chaos to fluid turbulence

 

Publications

A Network of Biologically Inspired Rectified Spectral Units (ReSUs) Learns Hierarchical Features Without Error Backpropagation

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, arXiv:2512.23146, March 14, 2026

S. Qin, J. Pughe-Sanford, A. Genkin, Pembe Gizem Ozdil, P. Greengard, A. Sengupta, et al.

Neurons as Detectors of Coherent Sets in Sensory Dynamics

The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025), arXiv:2510.26955, January 21, 2026

J. Pughe-Sanford, X. Ding, J. Moore, A. Sengupta, C. Epstein, P. Greengard, et al.

The neuron as a direct data-driven controller

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, arXiv:2401.01489, June 24, 2024

J. Moore, A. Genkin, Magnus Tournoy, J. Pughe-Sanford, Rob R. de Ruyter van Steveninck, and D. Chklovskii

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Center for Computational Neuroscience

Understanding the human brain is one of the greatest and most challenging scientific frontiers of our time. CCN’s mission is to develop models, principles and conceptual frameworks that deepen our knowledge of brain function — both in health and in disease.

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