Rajdeep Chakraborty
Just a brain trying to learn about itself and its place in nature.
scientific trainee
EMBL Rome, Italy
Hello, I am Rajdeep! I trained as a mechanical engineer, but a pandemic-fuelled binge of brain documentaries and books left me with questions I couldn’t put down. That curiosity became a deliberate effort to move into neuroscience: first teaching myself maths and programming, then moving into research
What drives me is building quantitative models that connect brain and behaviour, and eventually using them to better understand psychiatric conditions and design better mental health interventions.
Right now, I am a scientific trainee at EMBL Rome, where I lead the analysis for a project in Gross Group. I built the project’s DeepLabCut pipeline to track behaviour from video, and I am modelling decision-making under uncertainty using partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). Before EMBL, I was a Research Assistant at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, where I designed and implemented a novel Arduino-based assay to study decision-making under varied painful stimuli.
Previously, I have worked as a Technical Editor at Packt and as an Online Mathematics Tutor. Each role has been meaningful to me in its own way. As I keep learning and picking up new interests, I want to keep working in places where I can express myself (what self?), meet interesting people, and create things just for the fun of it.
Outside the lab, I watch Formula 1, read obscure historical facts, fall down philosophical rabbit holes, and learn mathematics for the joy of it.