Dissertation Award
Shailee Jain
The Society for the Neurobiology of Language is pleased to announce the 2023 Dissertation Award recipient: Shailee Jain
The Dissertation Award is generously sponsored by Brain and Language.
Investigating the neurobiology of language with artificial language systems
Wednesday, October 25, 2023, 2:30 – 3:25 pm, Auditorium
Log In to play session recordingChair: Liina Pylkkänen, New York University
Speaker: Shailee Jain, University of Texas at Austin
Shailee Jain completed her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin in July 2023, where she was advised by Dr. Alexander Huth. In August 2023 she started as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Edward Chang in the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of California, San Francisco. Before pursuing her PhD Shailee did her bachelors at NITK, Surathakal, India where she was a university gold medalist. In her dissertation, Shailee Jain blazed a new trail for computational neurolinguistics by bridging computer science and neuroscience. Shailee’s thesis work includes some of the earliest links between neural network language models and fMRI recordings, as well as a roadmap for how those models can be interpreted to gain insights into the brain. Papers describing this work have appeared in NeurIPS, ICML, Nature Neuroscience, Neurobiology of Language, and the Journal of Neuroscience. Shailee has also worked hard to build a community around these new computational approaches by co-organizing workshops on neuroscience & AI at NeurIPS (2019, 2022) and ICLR (2020), and she will be hosting a related symposium at SNL 2023. During her PhD, she was supported by fellowships from the William Orr Dingwall foundation and the UT Austin Graduate School. Shailee was selected as a MIT EECS Rising Star in 2021.