About me

I am a postdoctoral researcher fellow at McGill University and Mila - Quebec AI Institute, advised by Prof. David Rolnick. My current research focuses on developing machine learning methods that can help tackle the climate crisis. I develop causal representation learning and identifiable methods for dynamical systems, to improve the robustness and interpretability of data-driven climate models, and facilitate scientific discovery from observations of physical systems. I also develop denoising and active learning methods for bioacoustics recordings, to facilitate the processing of large recordings. I am mostly interested in modeling real-world physical data using tools and techniques from signal processing, optimization, probabilistic modeling, machine learning, and dynamical systems. I am a recipient of the Fonds de Recherche du Québec Postdoctoral Scholarship. Previously, my research was funded by the IVADO Exploratory Projects Program

I completed my Ph.D. in September 2024 at Columbia University, under the supervision of Liam Paninski. My Ph.D. work lied at the intersection of statistics and computational neuroscience. I focused on analyzing large-scale neural recordings and developing data-driven approaches to analyze and decode electrophysiological recordings. Before my PhD, I graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique in 2017 before getting a Master’s degree in Statistics at Stanford University, in 2019. During my Master, I was a research assistant under the supervision of Mykel Kochenderfer where I built a RNN-based model for predicting Sleep Quality from EEG recordings, and did an internship at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL under the supervision of Maneesh Sahani where I developed an approach to learn an interpretable model of latent continuous dynamical systems.

I care about reproducible, rigorous and transparent research, and also believe that science should be inclusive and accessible. I’m concerned about the potential harms of AI, and co-organize the Critical Science Reading Group to better understand the connections between science and society at large.

Feel free to contact me at julien dot boussard at mila dot quebec.