André Bastos, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology - Principal Investigator Bastos Lab - Vanderbilt Brain Institute - Vanderbilt University
Dr. Bastos received his PhD from the University of California, Davis (2013) where he worked with Drs. Ron Mangun and Marty Usrey on thalamocortical communication. During his PhD, Dr. Bastos was a Fulbright scholar in the laboratory of Dr. Pascal Fries at the F.C. Donders Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Nijmegen, The Netherlands (and later at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute in Frankfurt, Germany). His studies with Dr. Fries focused on distinct oscillatory frequencies used in feedforward vs. feedback cortical communication. He was also a visiting student with Dr. Karl Friston at Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London, where he first got interested in the theory of predictive coding. André then went on to work as a postdoctoral associate with Dr. Earl Miller at MIT and Dr. Nancy Kopell at Boston University where he used large-scale neuronal recordings to gain insight into predictive processing. He joined the faculty of Vanderbilt University in 2021 as an Assistant Professor of Psychology and member of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute (VBI). The mission of the Bastos Lab is to understand how neurons perform the Computations that enable Cognition and Consciousness. Bastos received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to further investigate the inhibitory brain mechanisms involved in predictive processing. Bastos’s lab plans to utilize the funding in a study to understand the role of cortical inhibition, helping to inform how predictions are made in the brain and potentially transforming our understanding of the brain in both health and disease.
