Anna’s role in a PhD society is to organise and coordinate the symposia. This includes choosing a topic and the format of the event, inviting speakers that work on the topic and complement each other, taking care of the venue and the guest list.
Anna Lebedeva studies meta learning, or learning to learn, in mice. The aim of the research is to discover the mechanism that implements the generalization of a learned concept, such that animals can perform well on a task independently of the particular stimuli given to them. The ultimate goal of the project is to understand this computation so well that we could implement it using an artificial intelligence agent. This research is conducted in collaboration between UCL and DeepMind.
Anna’s previous work includes research projects at the VU University of Amsterdam, where she did electrophysiology recordings in mouse and human brain tissue; at the UCSF, where she studied primary visual cortex plasticity in adult mice using calcium imaging. Her rotations as a PhD student at SWC include a project in the lab of Prof. Carandini and Prof. Harris using Neuropixels probes, a project in Dr. Bianco lab using light-sheet imaging, and a project in Dr. Branco lab on innate behaviours. Her undergraduate research was conducted at the department of Mathematics and Mechanics of Moscow State University, where she focused on statistics and graph theory.