Zaki Ellis Alaoui

1st Year PhD Student, Yale Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program (INP)  ·  NSF Graduate Research Fellow  ·  Gruber Science Fellow

I am a 1st-year PhD student in the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program at Yale University, supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a Gruber Science Fellowship. My research sits at the intersection of systems neuroscience and computational modeling of the visual system.

Most recently, I was a postbaccalaureate researcher in the Baccus Lab at Stanford School of Medicine, where I studied how the visual system encodes information during natural behavior, focusing on the effects of locomotion and saccadic eye movements on visual representations in the primary visual cortex of mice, combining large-scale neural recording with convolutional neural network modeling.

I am also interested in the computations performed by artificial neural networks as models of the brain. In this work, I applied causal analysis methods to uncover interpretable computational structures in models of the salamander retina and image classification networks.

I graduated from Amherst College in 2024 with a B.A. in Neuroscience, magna cum laude, where my senior thesis — supervised by Dr. Michael A. Cohen — investigated how familiarity with natural scenes alters the bandwidth of conscious perceptual awareness.