Davy Deng

Davy Deng is a graduate student in medical engineering and medical physics, working to model the brain from the ground up. His research centers on Caenorhabditis elegans—a transparent worm with a fully mapped connectome—using it as a platform to understand how nervous systems give rise to behavior. To this end, Davy is developing a high-speed, high-resolution light-sheet microscope that can record voltage activity across the entire nervous system during natural movement. As a MathWorks Fellow, he will pair this imaging system with biologically grounded deep learning models to predict and interpret neural dynamics in real time. Davy uses MATLAB to coordinate microscope hardware, synchronize voltage imaging with behavior tracking, and analyze dynamic neural signals. He also applies MATLAB-based algorithms to build connectome-constrained AI models that mirror the worm’s actual neural architecture. This research could open new pathways in neuroscience and AI by linking whole-brain activity with behavior in a living organism, thereby advancing our understanding of cognition from the level of neurons to networks.