Fellow Detail

I am a research software engineer working in the field of neuroscience. I am particularly interested in decision making of humans, invertebrates and machines, and how the brain’s function arises from its structure. In the past, among others, I worked on brain computer-interfaces, psychophysics, brain connectivity, natural language processing and neural networks. I want to raise researchers’ awareness of good testing and code review practices.

Currently (as of 2021), I am working as a Research Associate at the Fly Connectomics research group at the University of Cambridge, where we develop software tools that facilitate visualisation, preprocessing and analysis of neurons from Drosophila melanogaster brain. Although I work as a neuroscientist now, my career path is far from obvious. I graduated from Applied Physics at the University of Warsaw, but I quickly picked up some interest in the brain research. During my Erasmus exchange at the Humboldt University I learned more about machine learning and since then I have tried to combine these two fields in my daily work. My PhD at the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre focused on modelling perceptual decisions at various levels of hierarchy: from high-level cognitive models, to more biologically realistic spiking neural networks. I also worked in industry, both for big tech companies as well as for data science startups.

During two Google Summer of Code internships I learned the value of open source and since then I have been active in both R and Python coding communities. I was a co-organiser of the UK-wide SatRday Cardiff 2019 conference together with my friends from Cardiff R enthusiasts meet-up group. During the Fellowship I seek to promote good coding practices that are a gold standard in industry, but not yet in academia, like testing, CI and code reviews.