Alyson Fletcher, assistant professor of statistics in the UCLA College, has been named a 2019–2020 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Fletcher joins more than 50 women and men in the incoming fellowship class as they pursue work across the sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts.
Fletcher’s research interests include applied mathematics and statistical physics. At the Radcliffe Institute, Fletcher will investigate the basic question of how sensory data is encoded in the brain, how these representations evolve with learning and how they impact decision making and perception. Fletcher, who also teaches in the electrical engineerinng and computer science departments, will be collaborating with leading experimental and systems neuroscientists, as well as experts in machine learning at Harvard for this research.
“I am honored to be selected as a Radcliffe Fellow,” Fletcher said. “The program provides a tremendous opportunity to work with leading scientists and focus on fundamental questions. At Harvard, I plan to more deeply connect my mathematical and algorithmic methods for understanding large-scale systems with the latest technologies for neural recording. I look forward to returning to UCLA with new perspectives on these problems and a broader collaborative network.”
Fletcher is a founding member of the annual Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience and is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award. She teaches classes on machine learning, optimization, and applied probability.
The Radcliffe Institute is a school dedicated to creating and sharing ideas across all academic disciplines. Each year, the institute hosts about fifty leading scholars, scientists and artists from around the world in its residential fellowship program. It offers hundreds of public lectures, exhibitions, performances, conferences and other events every year. The institute is home to the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, the nation’s foremost archive on the history of women, gender, and sexuality.
