Jean-Paul Noel is an assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. He is also affiliated with the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain, the Minnesota Robotics Institute and the Data Science Initiative. He received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from Vanderbilt University (2014 to 2018) and did his postdoctoral training at New York University (2018 to 2023).

Noel is primarily interested in understanding how our brains infer hidden causes given sensory observations. Namely, to perceive, we must actively generate a hypothesis as to causal structure of the world that yielded the observed sensory data. The Noel lab is also interested in understanding how this process goes awry in different neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions, with a focus on autism spectrum disorder. Beyond trying to globally understand of neural circuits engender perception and inference, the topic of study is also central in building next-generation generative artificial intelligence. The lab takes an integrative approach, employing techniques from cognitive neuroscience in humans (e.g., EEG, psychophysics and VR/AR), systems neuroscience in awake and behaving rodents (e.g., large-scale neurophysiology and optogenetics), and computational neuroscience (e.g., Bayesian modeling and artificial neural networks).