Mitchell Ostrow

I’m a 3rd year PhD student at MIT. I’m interested in bridging systems neuroscience, cognitive science, and deep learning through the lens of dynamical systems theory and machine learning. To that end, I design and use quantitative methods to understand computations performed by both biological and artificial neural networks. I’ve worked in medicine (as an EMT), experimental neuroscience, computational neuroscience, and artificial intelligence (in industry).
I also work as a freelance editor, especially for college admission essays and graduate school statements of purpose, but I can edit both technical and non-technical pieces more generally. Feel free to reach out to me at [last-name] (at) mit.edu if you’re interested.
I’m grateful to have been supported at MIT by the Computationally-Enabled Integrative Neuroscience Fellowship and the Praecis Presidential Fellowship. I’m currently supported by the NSF GRFP.
Simply Neuroscience interviewed me on their podcast, The Synapse, about doing neuroscience research at Yale. Link here.
news
Jul 25, 2025 | DSA is featured as a tutorial in the Neuromatch Academy NeuroAI course! Thanks to Alex Murphy and Xaq Pitkow. |
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Feb 15, 2025 | Our submission “AgentDSA: Dynamical Similarity Analysis for Neural Controllers” was accepted to the Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making Conference! |
Feb 08, 2025 | Very happy to have contributed to the Computation-Thru-Dynamics Benchmark, led by Chris Versteeg! https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.07.637062.abstract |
Nov 08, 2024 | I’ve successfully passed my qualification exam! |
Jun 24, 2024 | I’m starting an internship at Meta doing Machine Learning Research on the Neuromotor Interfaces Team in New York City! |
Jun 17, 2024 | My second paper, “Delay Embedding Theory of Neural Sequence Models”, was accepted to the ICML 2024 Workshop on Next Generation Sequence Models! https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11993v1 |
Apr 15, 2024 | I’m very fortunate to have won the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship, to fund the next three years of my research! |
Jan 24, 2024 | My paper, “Beyond Geometry: Comparing the Temporal Structure of Computation in Neural Circuits with Dynamical Similarity Analysis” was accepted to the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience conference as an oral presentation (4%) and to COSYNE (Computational Systems Neuroscience conference) as an oral, (2%)! |
Jun 20, 2023 | My first full paper preprint is out! https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.10168, and was accepted to NeurIPS, 2023! |
Mar 31, 2023 | After four excellent rotations, I am joining Ila Fiete’s lab for my thesis work! |
Mar 28, 2023 | Our abstract ‘Do Deep Neural Networks Have Concepts?’ was selected as a talk at the Philosophy of Deep Learning Conference, hosted at NYU |
Aug 28, 2022 | Starting PhD! 👨🏻🎓 |
Dec 18, 2021 | Graduated from Yale. |
selected publications
- Characterizing control between interacting subsystems with deep Jacobian estimationarxiv, 2025
- How Diffusion Models Learn to Factorize and ComposeNeural Information Processing Systems, 2024