Brian Goodell

Hello! I'm Brian, a programmer and maker currently building computational and physical tools for neuroscience research in the Flavell Lab at MIT. I come from academic backgrounds in Computer Science and Political Science, with no formal Neuro training, which reflects my focus on cross-disciplinary work and broad interest in learning. Outside the lab I'm usually running, dancing, or working on projects to make my life better.

  Why study worm neuroscience?

    A fair question for a CS-oriented person. It mostly comes from the fact that if you want to answer questions about efficient, goal-directed decision making, there really isn't a better place to start. C. elegans is a tiny nematode with 302 neurons; few enough that we can record activity in every neuron across the whole brain as the animal moves freely. Understanding how they perform complex behaviors, including optimization tasks (e.g. moving towards chosen cultivation temperatures), gives us insights which can be applied to improving our own systems.

    To do this effectively, you need to both control inputs and observe internal computations & states. Even better if you can control the inputs based on the internal state. That's what my work has made possible for the first time. Using a laser to change the temperature the worm experiences alongside a whole-brain real-time imaging and activity-extraction pipeline, we essentially have a debugger for a biological computational system.