Nancy at the IBRO-SIMONS Computational Neuroscience Imbizo

In December 2018, Nancy Lubalo (MSIT’19) attended the IBRO-SIMONS Computational Neuroscience Imbizo in Cape Town, South Africa. She won a scholarship to the intensive three-week summer school which had master’s and PhD students learn about cutting edge research techniques in computational neuroscience under the tutelage of the world’s leading experts in the field.

At the summer school, Lubalo got to learn how artificial neural networks can be used to inform neuroscience research. Faculty members at the school were working on adapting the cost function used in artificial neural networks in brain learning. She attributes her success in the program to the skills she acquired as a student at CMU-Africa. “The projects, assignments and internship sharpened my problem solving capacity. I now believe in myself and have confidence in the skills I have to offer. I no longer second guess myself,” says Lubalo.

Together with PhD students in research, Lubalo was able to implement and replicate a research paper on local learning rules to attenuate forgetting in neural networks. On her learnings from this experience, Lubalo had this to say: “computational neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field that attracts people from backgrounds like biology, neuroscience, psychology, computer science, machine learning, physics and mathematics among others. Coming from a computer science background, grasping the biology aspect of the program was quite challenging. However, I was able to take an online short course which made the learning curve less steep and at the end of the summer school I was able to do a project in this area. “

Lubalo settled in and adapted to the fast-paced program at the school easily because she had developed the grit for working long hours at CMU-Africa. She also credits, the machine learning and deep learning courses she had taken at CMU-Africa which made the transition to computational neuroscience easier. “Before the Imbizo I was not really sure about getting a PhD, but the experience at the summer school made it clear to me that I wanted to advance in Computational neuroscience and Machine Learning,” says Lubalo.

Nancy Lubalo will graduate from CMU-Africa in June 2019.