Leo Waschke
Fellow, Max Planck UCL Centre, Berlin
Leo Waschke studied psychology and neuroscience in Leipzig and Berlin (2011–2016) before pursuing a PhD with Jonas Obleser at the University of Lübeck, Germany. During his PhD (2020), Leo worked on identifying and characterising perceptually and behaviourally relevant brain states using electrophysiology and pupillometry. To this end, he used different approaches and models to quantify temporal variations in neural recordings, separating oscillatory and aperiodic signal features. He closely collaborated with the Voytek Lab at UCSD and spent parts of his PhD time there. During his initial postdoc with Douglas Garrett and the Lifespan Neural Dynamics Group at the MPIB in Berlin (started 2020), Leo has been working on linking neural variability on different temporal and spatial scales to intra- and inter-individual differences in neural processing and performance. He aims to delineate separate and shared aspects of information-theoretic estimates of brain signal complexity as well as more commonly used metrics by analysing datasets ranging from human fMRI to single cell spiking data. By connecting findings across methods and scales, he plans to help further our understanding of the generating principles behind successful adaptive behaviour.