Tatiana Engel is an assistant professor at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. She received her M.Sc. in Physics from Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia and her Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, in 2007. She completed her postdoctoral training in computational neuroscience at Yale University and Stanford University. She was then on the faculty of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from 2017-2023.
Engel’s laboratory develops theory, models, and computational methods that leverage newly available large-scale recordings from behaving animals to understand how the activity is orchestrated across neural populations to drive behavior. Sensory, cognitive, and motor functions arise from networks of neurons distributed throughout the brain. The mammalian brain comprises hundreds of millions of neurons interconnected densely and recurrently within and across regions. Her research investigates how global neural activity is coordinated across this elaborate anatomical circuitry to produce a unified behavioral output. Engel and her team develop algorithms that can uncover neural population dynamics on single trials in experimental data. They also construct network models to predict how population dynamics arise from anatomical connectivity and change with behavioral states. This work benefits from close collaborations with experimental neuroscience laboratories that collect neurophysiological data in animals engaged in sophisticated tasks, such as attention, decision-making, and learning.
Current Project: International Brain Lab