Alexander Mathis is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University working with Prof. Venkatesh N. Murthy. He is interested in elucidating how the brain gives rise to adaptive behavior with a particular interest in olfactory and motor behaviors. For those purposes, he develops deep learning methods to analyze animal behavior, neural data, as well as creates experimentally testable computational models. His PhD thesis with Prof. Andreas Herz focused on deriving properties of grid cells from optimal coding assumptions, and figuring out how the distributed population activity can be decoded by biophysically plausible models.