Jake Russin profile picture

I am a postdoc at Brown University working with Michael Frank and Ellie Pavlick. I received my PhD from UC Davis, where I worked with Randall O'Reilly in the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. I have also spent time working at Meta AI (Summer 2022) with Brenden Lake and Dieuwke Hupkes, at Microsoft Research (Summer 2020) with Paul Smolensky and Roland Fernandez and at MILA (Summer 2018) with Yoshua Bengio and Jason Jo. Before graduate school, I received my B.A. in neuroscience and philosophy from Colorado College. I am from Miami, FL and in my spare time I enjoy playing basketball, bouldering, and reading philosophy.


Research Interests

My interests lie broadly in the intersection of computational neuroscience and machine learning, with a particular focus on: 1) Compositionality, systematicity, and reasoning in neural networks, 2) Neural network models of learning and inference with cognitive maps, 3) Models of human reinforcement learning, with a focus on temporal abstraction, and 4) Biologically plausible models of predictive learning and human vision. I also conduct experiments with human subjects and collaborate with experimental cognitive neuroscientists to study how the human brain can accomplish these cognitive functions.