Leyla is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Windreich Department for AI & Human Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her work lies at the intersection of neuroscience, AI, and cognitive science, integrating approaches from geometry, topology, and information theory to understand how systems with different learning mechanisms (i.e.: biological and artificial neural networks) acquire, generalize, and represent perceptual information.
After receiving her PhD in Computational Cognitive Neuroscience from Rutgers University’s Brain Imaging Center, she was also a joint-postdoc in the Concepts and Actions Lab at Carnegie Mellon University and in the ProAction Lab at the University of Coimbra. Before that, she spent multiple years researching how children acquire and apply causal reasoning and inference in the Computational Cognitive Development Lab and at the Central European University’s Cognitive Science Department. and received an MA in linguistics from the Utrecht University.