Eric Shea-Brown

Eric Shea-Brown is a Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Washington, part of the College of Arts & Sciences. He holds adjunct roles in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics and is an affiliate investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. His research focuses on the nonlinear dynamics of neural networks, decision-making processes in neural circuits, and the interplay between neural encoding and sensory information. He collaborates extensively with experimentalists and theorists across institutions, leveraging tools from dynamical systems, stochastic processes, and information theory.

Education:

• Bachelor's in Engineering Physics, UC Berkeley
• Ph.D. in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Princeton University

Eric's work is supported by the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund, NSF, NIH, and the Simons Foundation. His lab emphasizes equity and inclusion and is part of the UW Computational Neuroscience Center. He has held postdoctoral positions at NYU’s Courant Institute and has affiliations with the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering and the UW Institute for Neuroengineering.

Research highlights include studies on neural decision-making dynamics, spike coordination mechanisms, graph-theoretic approaches to neural connectomics, and chaos in spiking circuits. His group collaborates with UW neuroscience departments and the Allen Institute to analyze emerging neural datasets.