In the last 2-3 weeks I had the luck to meet (online) and mentor several young researchers, aspiring computational neuroscientists and NeuroAI researchers. I had the honor to mentor two groups on their research projects (one working on the Motor RNN project (group Manifold Mechanics) and another one working on inter-area communications using the IBL dataset (group 404)) for the Neuromatch Computational Neuroscience summer course, and two pods, each with two groups, from the NeuroAI course (two groups working on biologically informed network architectures for robotic control, and two on bilogically plaussible learning algorithms). I learned so much from them over these weeks, and I hope they also gained a lot by working on their projects.
I couldn’t be more lucky12 meeting such motivated, hardworking, and brilliant young minds. Hope our trajectories will cross again at some point in the future.
Footnotes
And I call it luck, because the last time I mentored (or at least tried to mentor) a group for NMA, things went downhill, and that was definitely not NMA’s fault. Within a week after two of the mentees started following my GitHub profile (I made them unfollow me later but still have screenshot proof is someone is interested), they started refusing to collaborate with the third member, and wanted to either ensure their first authorship in the upcoming micropublication, or abandon the project. Incidentally, this happened exactly at the time when I left my previous postdoc lab, at a time when some people (I don’t know who) were trying to track my whereabouts and block my path forward. So, this could either be a complete coincidence, that I happened to find myself in two toxic situations simultaneously, be rooted in my own behavior (or in someone trying to paint that image of me), or perhaps these two events were somehow connected. We’ll never know. 😉 As another coincidence, the project I was mentoring happened to use the same dataset as my main postdoc project, though it was tackling a completely different question. So, this time, I was lucky enough to keep everything private until the projects were completed, and we faced absolutely no issues. ;)↩︎
Funny enough, after a bit of digging to understand what was going on, since such a coincidence felt really strange to me, I found that one of those two mentees had, since August or September 2024, a post on their LinkedIn profile showcasing their NMA summer school presentation (on the same project). They were also announcing their participation in the Impact Scholar program and looking for collaborators. So, it was quite straightforward for anyone to connect the dots, especially since at that time I was applying for positions and was sharing my CV, where I was mentioning this mentoring activity as ongoing. ;)↩︎