I’m Marius Schneider, a postdoctoral researcher in the Bionic Vision Lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara. My research focuses on how the brain extracts and integrates relevant visual information from complex, dynamic environments to support navigation and behavior.

I completed my PhD in Systems and Computational Neuroscience at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute (ESI) for Neuroscience in Frankfurt, affiliated with the International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) for Neural Circuits. I defended my thesis with highest honors at Radboud University Nijmegen in May 2024. During my PhD, I developed a theoretical model of inter-areal coherence that provided an alternative explanation for widely observed patterns in functional connectivity, contributing to ongoing debates on the role of oscillations in neural communication.

Broadly, I’m interested in how different neural populations and brain areas contribute to flexible sensory processing. I approach these questions through a combination of large-scale electrophysiological data analysis, deep learning, and biophysically realistic modeling — with the goal of building models that connect brain activity to behavior in both biological and artificial systems.

Publications

(* equal contribution)
Distinct feedforward and feedback pathways for cell-type specific attention effects
Paper | Preprint | Tweetprint
A mechanism for inter-areal coherence through communication based on connectivity and oscillatory power
Paper | Code | Talk | Preprint | Tweetprint
Cell-type-specific propagation of visual flicker
Paper | Code | Preprint | Tweetprint
Biological complexity facilitates tuning of the neuronal parameter space
Paper | Code | Preprint | Tweetprint
A general principle of dendritic constancy: A neuron’s size-and shape-invariant excitability
Paper | Code | Tweetprint
Principles of large-scale neural interactions
Paper
Attentional modulation of inter-areal coherence explained by frequency shifts
Paper
Aperiodic processes explaining rhythms in behavior: A matter of false detection or definition?
Paper | Code | Tweetprint
Distinct roles of PV and Sst interneurons in visually-induced gamma oscillations
Paper | Tweetprint

Teaching

Neuromatch Academy: Computational Neuroscience 2022
Teaching Assistant, theoretical modeling and data-driven analyses
7th Baltic-Nordic School on Neuroinformatics BNN, FIAS Frankfurt am Main, 2019
Teaching Assistant, Modeling Healthy and Diseased Brain: From Dendrites to Neurons and Networks
Undergraduate Mentor, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, 2019
Supervision of Bachelor's thesis
Computational Neurobiology, Undergraduate course, Goethe University, Biological Sciences, 2018
Teaching Assistant with Hermann Cuntz, Specialisation 2 ”fly motion vision”.

Talks

Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Berlin, Germany, 2022
Do neurons communicate through coherence?
Neuromatch Conference, Zoom, 2021
A mechanism for inter-areal coherence through communication based on connectivity and oscillatory power
Watch here

Mini Projects

IBRO-Simons Computational Neuroscience Imbizo Summer School, Cape Town, South Africa,2022
A small project on reinforcement learning, Code