Jorge Aurelio Menéndez

About Me

I'm a graduate student in the CoMPLEX program at UCL, working at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit under the supervision of Peter Latham. My PhD research is concerned with understanding biological motor learning, by building and analyzing biologically motivated algorithms for learning in recurrent neural networks. I have studied this at the level of synaptic plasticity as well as from the perspective of control theory. More broadly, I am interested in the neural algorithms and representations underlying mammals’ astounding capacity to learn and adapt in seemingly arbitrary novel environments. To attack such questions, I take inspiration from tools and concepts in machine learning to build mechanistic models of brains and behavior that can hopefully explain experimental findings.

In my past life, I did my undergrad at Johns Hopkins University and the Peabody Conservatory, where I majored in Cognitive Science and Classical Guitar Performance. There, I spent four years studying classical guitar under the guidance of maestro Manuel Barrueco, and three years doing research on visual working memory in the Visual Thinking Lab under the supervision of Prof. Jonathan Flombaum and Prof. Gi Yeul Bae.

Publications

Conference presentations

Teaching

Contact

jorge.menendez.15 [at] [ucl . ac . uk]