Alexander Ratzan
Ph.D. Student
Computer Science
I’m Alex, a first year PhD student at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. As a School of Engineering fellow, I am working with Dr. Erdem Varol in the Neuroinformatics Lab to develop novel, efficient, and scalable methods to solve problems in neuroscience.
My current research lies at the intersection of genomics and neuroimaging with the goal of aligning these data types to better understand brain-behavior relationships. This research involves a variety of deep learning, contrastive learning, and graph theoretical methods.
More generally, I’m passionate about helping us better understand brain disorders through computational techniques.
Research Interests: large-scale neuroimaging, machine learning, computational psychiatry/neurology, cognitive neuroscience
Background
I received my Bachelor’s degree in Cognitive & Brain Sciences from Tufts University. At Tufts, I worked as an undergraduate research assistant at the Tufts Human Computer Interaction Lab and the Integrative Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. I also played on the Tufts men’s soccer team where I competed for four years and won two DIII National Championships.
After undergrad, I worked as a neuroimaging research technician and data analyst at Columbia University’s Department of Neurology and Biostatistics.
In my free time I enjoy playing soccer, biking, travelling, and supporting Arsenal FC.
News
- December ‘23: First-author publication accepted at Memory
- September ‘23: Started PhD at New York University
- April ‘23: Received National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program Honorable Mention Award
- November ‘22: Presented undergrad research at Society for Neuroscience Conference