Katie A. Ferguson

I am a neuroscientist studying how the brain constructs our experience of the world. What we see, hear, or feel is not a direct readout of our senses; it is actively shaped by what we expect, how alert we are, and what we have learned from past experience. This capacity for flexible, context-dependent perception underlies our ability to learn, make decisions, and adapt to new environments.

My research focuses on how cellular diversity within cortical circuits makes this adaptability possible, using the visual system as a window into these questions. The cortex contains many distinct neuron types, each with unique physiological properties and connectivity. This diversity matters: different cell types are positioned to selectively integrate incoming sensory signals, feedback from other cortical areas, and signals conveying arousal, attention, and prior experience. How these populations interact to shape flexible, adaptive representations of the sensory world is the central question driving my work. Understanding the neural basis of this flexibility is also key to understanding conditions in which perception and cognition are affected, including schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder.

My training bridges mathematics, computational neuroscience, and experimental systems neuroscience. I earned my B.Math and M.Math in Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, and my Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience at the University of Toronto, where I built biophysical models of hippocampal circuits. As a postdoctoral researcher and Associate Research Scientist at Yale University, I combined optical techniques such as two-photon calcium imaging (which allows us to watch the activity of hundreds of individual neurons in awake, behaving animals) with genetic tools, behavioral tasks, and advanced quantitative analyses to study how inhibitory circuits shape visual processing.

My work has been published in journals including Cell Reports, Nature Communications, Neuron, and Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and supported by an NIH K99 Pathway to Independence Award and a BBRF Young Investigator Grant.