Becket Ebitz

Université de Montréal

The Ebitz lab uses a combination of experimental and computational techniques to examine natural variation in brain states. The lab focuses on how cognitive flexibility emerges spontaneously from interactions between neurons. Experimentally, the lab employs neural population recordings in the non-human primate, often in combination with neuromodulatory biomarkers, systemic pharmacological challenges, and local causal interventions. Computationally, the lab develops new mathematical techniques to identify the latent structure in behaviour, infer internal goal and belief states, and measure the dynamics of cognition: the forces that either stabilize brain and behaviour or permit them to change over time.

Becket Ebitz earned a PhD in Neurobiology from Duke University in 2013 and completed other research training at the National Institutes of Health, Stanford University, Princeton University, and the University of Minnesota. Among other journals, Becket’s work has been published in Neuron, Nature Neuroscience, Current Biology, and PNAS. Becket has won prestigious prizes and awards including a CV Starr Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Promising Investigator Award from RippleNeuro and he currently holds research fellowships from the Swiss Jacobs Foundation and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec. The Ebitz lab was established in the Department of Neurosciences at the Université de Montréal in August of 2020 and is currently funded by major operating and equipment grants from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and the Power Corporation of Canada.

Email: becket@ebitzlab.com or r.becket.ebitz@umontreal.ca
Ebitz Lab