Graduating from UT Austin

I finished my MS in Neuroscience at the University of Texas at Austin this month.

I arrived in Austin from a statistics and CS program with the goal of learning enough neuroscience to ask my own questions instead of borrowing other people’s. Eighteen months later the clearest evidence that it worked is the set of things I did not know how to do when I started: reading EEG, designing a study around a hypothesis rather than a dataset, and sitting with the fact that biological data is noisy in ways that do not politely resolve with a larger sample.

The work spanned three places. At the CoCo-Neuro Lab I curated a large-scale video database of facial stimuli using ML-based filtering and helped build experimental tooling for human behavioral studies. At Global Innervation I built EMG and EEG classification pipelines and co-authored three papers under faculty mentorship — a peer-reviewed publication in the Journal of Neurophysiological Monitoring plus the StableSleep and ArtifactGen preprints. At Nervio I built an org-wide tool for EEG and SSEP visualization and annotation, which taught me more about what clinicians actually need from software than any paper has.

Thanks to everyone in Austin who was generous with their time. Next is Seattle.