Ruben Coen-Cagli obtained his B.S./M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the University of Napoli Federico II. In 2008, he started his postdoctoral feellowship with Odelia Schwartz in collaboration with Peter Dayan and Adam Kohn. In 2021, he joined the lab of Alexandre Pouget with the SSN-IBRO postdoctoral fellowship. He joined Albert Einstein College of Medicine as a faculty in 2016.

Coen-Cagli’s research in has addressed sensory processing and sensorimotor coordination in biological and artificial systems. He has focused on the role of probabilistic Bayesian computation for understanding natural image processing in cortical neurons, spatial and temporal contextual effects in vision, neuronal population coding in visual and auditory discrimination tasks, and eye-hand coordination.

The Coen-Cagli lab uses a quantitative and hypothesis-driven approach to understanding perception and cortical processing. It develops machine learning algorithms to generate insights into the complex structure of sensory signals from the natural environment and how they could be processed efficiently. The lab adopts theories of neural coding to understand how veridical perception is achieved in face of abundant sensory variability and ambiguity. It combines advances in both fields to generate novel hypotheses about cortical computation, and test them experimentally with human psychophysics in our lab, and invasive neural recordings and perturbations through collaborations. It also develop statistical models for data analysis, to test quantitatively our theories.