Dr. Tatiana Engel

Biography

Tatiana Engel is an Associate Professor at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, where her research focuses on core brain functions such as perception, action, and decision-making. She investigates how complex patterns of neural activity are coordinated by local microcircuits within brain regions. Engel's work leverages massively-parallel neurotechnologies that enable recordings of thousands of neurons at a brain-wide scale, which have provided detailed maps of brain-wide anatomical connectivity. Her research utilizes large-scale datasets to reveal dynamic activity patterns that are highly variable over time across widely distributed structured brain networks. Engel's laboratory employs computational and theoretical approaches to understand how coordinated activity arises from distributed neural circuitry that drives behavioral and cognitive functions. She develops mathematical models and data analysis methods to uncover the mechanisms of distributed circuits, utilizing a rich array of experimental data. Additionally, her work benefits from close collaborations with experimental neuroscience laboratories collecting neurophysiological data from animals engaged in sophisticated tasks such as attention, decision-making, and learning.

Research Interests