Welcome
Hi, I am Debottam. I am a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck School of Cognition. I have just finished my rotation year and am in the process of figuring out my PhD project. I am primarily based at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig. Howvever, I am jointly supervised by Jürgen Jost and also Peter Dayan, who is based at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.
Before joining the school of Cognition, I was a research assistant at CIMeC at the University of Trento, where I worked with Roberto Bottini. My formal background is in computer science, and I have done my master's thesis under Sridhar Devarajan, who is affiliated with the Computer Science department at IISc Bangalore. I also had a short stint at Oracle inbetween my masters and deciding to continue on my academic journey.
I am interested in a myriad of things, including but not limited to looking at neural data from a dynamical systems perspective, which is what I'm going to focus on during my PhD. However, I have an unhealthy interest in all things AI, be it diffusion models or transformers. Over the years, I have also picked up skills relating to analysing fMRI and MRI data, and have a little experience in analysing MEG data as well. Feel free to reach out if you think we can collaborate on something, I'm always up for some side projects. You can find a more detailed description of my work experience in the sidebar if you'd prefer.
When I'm not working or guiltily thinking about how I should be working, I am doomscrolling on twitter. Other than that, I am an avid football fan, and sadly a perpetually suffering Manchester United supporter. I also enjoy reading[1] and watching obscure movies so I can pretend I'm an interesting person. I love checking out museums in which ever city I visit, much to the annoyance of some of my friends who think museums are boring. I also really love cooking and listening to podcasts[2], and most of the time do them together.
[1] Check out what I'm reading now↩
[2] Totally unwarranted podcast and newsletter recommendation list↩
