Anja Zai

Position:
Research Fellow
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Before shifting my focus to neuroscience and vocal learning in songbirds for my PhD, I studied physics at ETH Zurich delving first into optics and then into the application of neuromorphic engineering, i.e. I worked on a system for reconstructing the analog waveform of an input sound from the recorded spike trains of an artificial silicon cochlea. My PhD project then aimed to shed light on the question how behavioral variability can be used for learning new motor tasks and for improving already learned ones. Now, as a research fellow, I continue to study the songbird as a model system for vocal learning and learning in general but also do simple behavioral experiments with humans aiming to bridge machine learning, neuroscience and psychophysics.

Supervisor

Richard Hahnloser

Publications

2023

2022

2020

2019

2017

  • D. Lipkind, A.T. Zai, A. Hanuschkin, G.F. Marcus, O. Tchernichovski, R.H.R. Hahnloser Songbirds work around computational complexity by learning song vocabulary independently of sequence., Nature Communication, 8:(2147), 2017
  • Homare Yamahachi, Anja T. Zai, Ryosuke O. Tachibana, Anna E. Stepien, Diana I. Rodrigues, Sophie Cavé-Lopez, Gagan Narula, Juneseung Lee, Ziqiang Huang, Heiko Hörster, Daniel Düring, Richard H. R. Hahnloser Welfare of zebra finches used in research, bioRxiv, 2017 pdf

2016

2015