Draelos Lab @
February 25, 2026
Anne was named a 2026 Frontiers of Science Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences. She is one of 81 scientists receiving this fellowship this year.
February 23, 2026
Jonathan presented his research “Adaptive stimulation and response modeling of latent neural dynamics” at the Neuroscience Graduate Programs 700 Seminar for his fourth-year candidate talk.
Well done, Jonathan!
January 19, 2026
Nicole Hayes joins the lab as a our first Postdoc fellow from the Biomedical Engineering department. Welcome, Nicole!
December 21, 2025
Paula’s abstract, “Real-Time Bayesian Optimization for Efficient Multidimensional Neural Tuning Characterization” was accepted for poster presentation at COSYNE 2026 in Portugal. The conference will be held in Lisbon, Portugal from March 12-17, 2026. Come check out Paula’s poster (#1-088) on March 12!
A fundamental goal in neuroscience is understanding the relationship between sensory stimuli and resultant neural responses. Characterizing neural responses across multiple dimensions of visual stimuli - such as direction of motion, size, and contrast - is essential for understanding complex sensory processing and tuning. As we move towards studying real-world conditions, a challenge arises from the large number of stimuli to present when forming all possible combinations of these parameters, along with time and financial constraints posed by in vivo experiments. There is thus a critical need for systems capable of efficiently capturing neural responses in real time and adaptively selecting a manageable subset of stimuli to display. These systems must also be flexible enough to learn and identify neural tuning curves across various experimental platforms, brain regions, behavioral conditions, and visual inputs. Here, we developed an efficient closed-loop system that integrates streaming modeling with experimental imaging to capture and analyze neural responses in high-dimensional stimuli environments in vivo. We employed Bayesian optimization with Gaussian Processes and custom multidimensional kernels to fit multivariate tuning curves and thereby identify stimuli that maximize neural responses. We applied our method to study the mouse primary visual cortex (V1), using two calcium indicators (GCaMP6s,6f) and five C57BL/6 mice. We successfully characterized multidimensional neural responses across a five-dimensional visual space, adaptively sampling fewer than 91 stimuli (about 3% of ~3k possibilities). Preliminary results revealed distinct functional types of neuron preferences. For example, the directional tuning of some V1 neurons is modulated simultaneously by stimulus size and contrast; interactions that would have been missed if such combinations of stimulus dimensions were not measured. With efficient real-time identification of neural tuning preference in vivo, we can also improve robustness to noise and dynamic changes in neural tuning through optimizing kernel selection and hyperparameter tuning throughout an experiment.
November 25, 2025
Varnika collaborated with the Kaczorowski Lab led by Postdoc fellow Yiding Cao on their paper “Uncovering hidden factors of cognitive resilience in Alzheimer’s disease using a conditional-Gaussian mixture variational autoencoder”,
which was accepted into Nature’s npj dementia journal.
You can read it here!
November 17, 2025
The Draelos Lab made their way to the Society for Neuroscience 2025 conference in San Diego.
Rachel presented a poster on her Master’s thesis work from the University of Washington, “Aβ, Tau, and FDG-PET synthesis from multi-contrast MRI using deep learning”.
Jonathan presented a poster on “Adaptive stimulation & response modeling of neural latent dynamics in real time”.
Paula presented a poster on “Real-time Bayesian Optimization System for Efficiently Characterizing Multidimensional Neural Responses”.
October 14, 2025
Varnika Umashankar, one of our master students, presented a poster on “Characterizing Variational Autoencoders with Conditional Gaussian Mixture Distributions” at the 2025 Michigan AI Symposium
September 18, 2025
Rio collaborated with the Chestek Lab led by PhD student Hisham Temmar on their paper “Long-term Intracortical Neural activity and Kinematics (LINK): An intracortical neural dataset for chronic brain-machine interfaces, neuroscience, and machine learning”,
which was accepted into the 39th Conference of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).
You can read it here!
August 04, 2025
Rachel Iritani joined the lab as a PhD student from the Biomedical Engineering department. Welcome, Rachel!
She was awarded a National Science Foundation’s Graduate Fellowship Program scholarship this summer to support her research. Congrats!
August 01, 2025
The Draelos Lab was awarded an NIH RO1 Grant for the project “Multimodal Probabilistic Machine Learning for Uncovering Latent Factors of Resilience in Alzheimer’s Disease”, in collaboration with the Kaczorowski Lab
This is funded by the National Institute On Aging of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01AG092459.
July 31, 2025
Our undergraduate student, Lucy Liu, presented a poster on “Adaptive Frame Selection and Pose Estimation for Real-Time Hand Tracking in Non-Human Primates” at the Magnificent Michigan Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (MM-SURF) session
July 25, 2025
Rio passed his qualifying exam and advanced to candidacy in Biomedical Engineering. His research focuses on “Improving Decoder Generalization through Probabilistic and Statistical Approaches to Modeling and Manipulating Neural Data”
Congrats, Rio!
July 24, 2025
The 2025 BME Summer Workshop, July 23-24, focused on the Future of Neurotechnology and brought together leading researchers, clinicians, and students to discuss “emerging tools and approaches shaping the future of brain research and innovation.”
Anne presented the lab’s research during the session on “Computational & AI/ML Techniques.”
This year, the workshop hosted its first student Hackathon, where students gathered in teams and worked to solve a research question of their choosing based on data they were given. Congrats to Lucy and her team for winning the Hackathon with their project “Can we detect abnormal brain activty before a seizure occurs?”
The workshop also hosted a NETP-sponsored Poster Session which showcased ongoing work from trainees and faculty. Congrats to Jake for being a poster session winner with his poster on “Using Markerless Motion Tracking for Real-Time Functional Electrical Stimulation Optimization”
June 18, 2025
Jake passed his qualifying exam and advanced to candidacy in Biomedical Engineering. His research focuses on “Using Markerless Motion Tracking and Real-Time FES Optimization for BMI-Controlled Dexterous Hand Movements”
Congrats, Jake!
March 20, 2025
Anne was recently interviewed in an episode of The Fundamentals, a Michigan Medicine-produced podcast that focuses on biomedical research. Check out the episode “A.I. and Bioinformatics to Reveal Hidden Networks of the Brain” here!
February 14, 2025
Congratulations to Sachin Salim for his paper acceptance in the Bioelectronic Medicine journal, titled “In vivo electrophysiology recordings and computational modeling can predict octopus arm movement”. You can read it here.
Sachin is currently pursuing his PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering at USC where he is developing a deep learning framework using quantile regression to synthesize missing MRI contrasts.
Congrats, Sachin!
January 09, 2025
Paula passed her preliminary exam and advanced to candidacy in Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics. Her research focuses on “Adaptive Kernel Selection and Hyperparameter Tuning for Streaming Algorithms in Modeling Neural Tuning Curves with High-Dimensional Visual Stimuli”
Congrats, Paula!
December 13, 2024
The Draelos Lab celebrated the end of the Fall 2024 semester with a lab lunch at KPOT.
Congrats to Josh who completed his master’s in Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics!
October 15, 2024
Tony presented a poster on “Thalamba: a new fast and scalable state-space model applied to office BCI decodings” at the 2024 Michigan AI Symposium
October 08, 2024
Jonathan presented his research at the “Analytical Computational Tools” Nanosymposium at Society for Neuroscience 2024 conference in Chicago. His presentation focused on his research, “Adaptive Alignment of Neural and Behavioral Dynamics”
October 08, 2024
The Draelos Lab made their way to the Society for Neuroscience 2024 conference in Chicago. Jake presented a poster on “A Multi-Camera Setup for Real-Time Hand Markless Tracking during Function Electrical Stimulation”
August 01, 2024
Our undergraduate student, Tony Luo, presented a poster on “Thalamba: improved accuracy and efficiency of offline BCI decoders with state-space models” at the Magnificent Michigan Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (MM-SURF) session
July 31, 2024
Our summer undergrad student, Patricio (Pato) Barber from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, presented his summer research at the Summer Intensive Research Experience in Neuroscience (SIREN) and Neuroscience Undergraduate Research Opportunity (NURO) talk and poster sessions. His research topic was on “Tracking the effects of holographic optogenetic photostimulation on neural population dynamics through a real-time dimensionality reduction algorithm”.
July 16, 2024
Anjali received the Endowment of Basic Sciences Research Staff Award for the BME department. You can read about it here. Congrats, Anjali!
July 10, 2024
The Draelos Lab passed their first safety inspection and is officially commissioned!
July 01, 2024
Paula Wu joined the lab as a PhD student from the Program in Biomedical Sciences (PIBS) of the Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics. Welcome, Paula!
May 08, 2024
Jonathan Gould, Jake Joseph, Rio Parsons, and Anjali Shankar all presented their research at the annual BME Symposium! Great job, guys!
May 02, 2024
The Draelos Lab went bowling to celebrate the end of the Winter 2024 semester at Revel & Roll!
Also, saying goodbye to some of our graduates! Good luck to Chang Li, Wenzhuo Lin, and Ying Zhou as they pursue their graduate studies!
April 10, 2024
We got a brand new GPU server to assist with both large offline model testing and high-throughput real-time model inference.
Stay tuned for our high-speed computational experiments!
April 04, 2024
Jonathan Gould becomes a National Science Foundation’s Graduate Fellowship Program scholar. Congrats, Jonathan!
February 20, 2024
Anne was awarded the 2024 Sloan Fellowship in Neuroscience! She is one of 126 scientists receiving this award this year, and is one of three U-M faculty in this cohort. You can read about it here.
November 13, 2023
The Draelos Lab made their way to the Society for Neuroscience 2023 conference in Washington D.C.! Jonathan presented a poster on “Real-time prediction of latent neural trajectories and behavior”
November 07, 2023
Anne presented at the NIH in Washington D.C.
November 07, 2023
The Draelos Lab celebrated the end of the Fall 2023 semester with a lab dinner at Aventura.
Congrats to Sachin who completed his master’s in Electrical & Computer Engineering!
September 25, 2023
Jake Joseph joined the lab as a PhD student from the Biomedical Engineering department. Welcome, Jake!
He received a Rackham Merit Fellowship and was awarded a spot in the Biomedical Informatics and Data Science Training Program (BIDS-TP) T32 fellowship. Congrats!
June 07, 2023
Rio Parsons joins the lab as a PhD student from the Biomedical Engineering department. Welcome, Rio!
May 01, 2023
Anne was awarded the University of Michigan Research Scout Award for the project “Real-Time In Vivo Adapative Stimulus Response Mapping”, with our collaborators Dr. Elise Savier and Dr. Christian Burgess.
May 01, 2023
Jonathan Gould joined the lab as our first PhD student from the Neuroscience Graduate Program. Welcome, Jonathan!
February 01, 2023
The Draelos Lab officially opens at the University of Michigan!