PhD Candidate · Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab · University of Pennsylvania
I study rapid structure learning in minds and machines — how people build structured knowledge quickly, and how to capture that in biologically-inspired neural network models.
I'm a PhD candidate in the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab (@schapirolab) at UPenn, combining behavioral experiments, fMRI & DTI, and neural network modeling to understand how the brain learns structure so quickly.
Before Penn, I was a lab manager at the Preston Lab (@prestonlab) at UT Austin and built research software in the Duncan Memory Lab (@DuncanLab) at the University of Toronto.
→ Publications, posters, and the full story at alexgordienko.com/research
Before research, I worked in numerous technical roles connecting form and function.
- CEO & Co-Founder, Knowtworthy — a meetings platform built to perfect team communication
- Product Designer, Conova — cross-platform UX in Figma
- IoT Backend Developer, Bell — production smart-city services
- Freelance — design, branding, and web apps for research libraries, publications, and startups
→ Résumé and portfolio at alexgordienko.com/work
- OpenMaze — open-source toolbox for building virtual navigation experiments · published in Behavior Research Methods (2022)
- hip-ACh — biologically-based neural network model of acetylcholine's role in hippocampal memory
- O-MINDS — normed image database software for reducing stimulus variability in episodic memory tasks