Mackenzie Weygandt Mathis

Mackenzie W. Mathis, is an American neuroscientist and principal investigator at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Her lab investigates adaptive mechanisms in biological and artificial intelligence to inform adaptive AI systems and translational research.

Early life and education
Mathis conducted her undergraduate education at the University of Oregon receiving a bachelors of science in 2007. She then worked as a senior research technician and lab manager at the Project A.L.S. Laboratory for Stem Cell Research at Columbia University from 2007 to 2012. Working under the mentorship of Dr. Christopher E. Henderson and Dr. Hynek Wichterle, Mathis modelled amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (A.L.S.) using stem cell-derived motor neurons. During her time in the lab, she published two first author scientific papers, one in the Journal of Neuroscience which offered a novel protocol for generating human limb-innervating neural subtypes in vitro for use in neurological disease research, and the other in Nature Biotechnology on benchmarking iPS stem cell lines ability to make motor neurons. Mathis then moved to Boston and joined the graduate program in molecular and cellular biology (MCB) at Harvard University. On her way to completing her PhD, she also completed a master's degree. During her PhD, Mathis conducted research on the neural circuits underlying reward prediction errors under the mentorship of Professor Naoshige Uchida at the Harvard Center for Brain Science. In her first year as a graduate student, Mathis received an National Science Foundation Fellowship to fund her graduate research. Mathis was able to merge her interests in motor control with Uchida's expertise in neural recordings and behavioral analysis to forge a new scientific direction in the lab and publish a first author paper in Neuron by the end of her PhD regarding the essential role played by the somatosensory cortex in forelimb motor adaptation in rodents. Near the end of her PhD Mathis was awarded the Rowland Fellowship which provided five years of funding to start her own lab at Harvard's Rowland Institute in Cambridge, MA. Prior to founding the Mathis Lab at Harvard, Mathis was also awarded the Women & the Brain (WATB) Fellowship for Advancement in Brain Science which provided her with the funding to work in Germany in the summer of 2017 under the mentorship of Professor Matthias Bethge at the University of Tübingen. In her postdoctoral work, Mathis focused on pioneering deep learning tools for neural and behavioral analysis which served as a critical step towards her independent career.

Career and research
In 2017, Mathis started her lab at the Rowland Institute at Harvard University with a goal of reverse engineering neural circuits that drive adaptive motor behavior. Through large-scale neural recordings and building novel robotic and machine learning tools, the Mathis Lab probes neural circuits and analyzes behavioral outputs to better understand how brain function relates to behavior. Together with Alexander Mathis, Mathis developed DeepLabCut, a deep learning tool to track animal posture over time. This tool relies on transfer learning to optimize an ImageNet-pretrained foundation model and the feature detectors from DeeperCut, to fine-tune on a desired new dataset after sufficient training. Now the package includes many more networks, including their own DLCRNet with pose tracking and re-identification of animals. Mathis has shown the versatility of this tool on many diverse datasets highlighting the robust design and potential for wide use in fields even beyond neuroscience. Mathis is dedicated to the concept of open science and as such, the novel deep learning tool she designed is open access such that researchers worldwide have access to the code in order to use this tool to analyze animal behaviors in an unbiased and precise way to inform a better understanding of how neural activity drives specific behaviors. Her work has been featured in Nature, Bloomberg Business Week, and The Atlantic.

As of August 2020, Mathis moved to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, working within the Brain Mind Institute, Center for Intelligent Systems & Neuro-X Institute as a tenure-track Professor. The lab is hosted at the Campus Biotech in Geneva, Switzerland, where Mathis holds the Bertarelli Foundation Chair of Integrative Neuroscience.

Awards and honors

 * 2023: Eric Kandel Young Neuroscientist Prize
 * 2022: FENS EJN Young Investigator Prize
 * 2020: Bertarelli Foundation Chair of Integrative Neuroscience
 * 2019 - 2023: CZI Essential Open Source Software for Science - grant for DeepLabCut
 * 2019 - : ELLIS Society Fellow, Natural Intelligence
 * 2018: Mind, Brain & Behavior Harvard University Faculty Award
 * 2018: eLife Travel Grant Award Winner
 * 2017: NVIDIA GPU Grant
 * 2017 - 2022: Rowland Fellowship
 * 2017: Women & the Brain Fellowship for Advancement of Neuroscience
 * 2013 - 2018: National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Life Sciences – Neuroscience
 * 2013, ’14, ’16: Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Teaching (MCB80, MCB145)
 * 2014: Dr. Ernest Peralta Fund Award for Best Qualifying Exam proposal & defense, Harvard
 * 2012 - 2013: Morris E. Zukerman Graduate Fellowship - awarded to top students in brain sciences at Harvard GSAS

Personal life
Mathis is married to neuroscientist Dr. Alexander Mathis who is an assistant professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. In her youth, she showed horses competitively in the US.