Byron Yu, Ph.D.

Byron Yu is an associate professor in the Departments of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001. He then worked with Krishna Shenoy at Stanford University on the neural basis of motor control and brain-computer interfaces and received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 2007. From 2007 to 2009, he was a postdoctoral fellow jointly with Krishna Shenoy at Stanford University and Maneesh Sahani at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, where he worked on statistical machine learning methods for analyzing large-scale neural recordings. He joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in 2010. His work aims to elucidate how large populations of neurons process information, from encoding sensory stimuli to driving motor actions. His group develops statistical algorithms for studying neural population activity (basic science) and for brain-computer interfaces (biomedical engineering). They then work closely with experimental collaborators to apply the developed algorithms to experimental data.

Current Projects:

Integrative approaches to understanding whole-brain computation

Communication between neural populations: circuits, coding, and behavior

Past Projects:

Corticocortical signaling between populations of neurons