I am a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Chris Baker at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda (USA) and guest researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig (Germany).
I study the links between human vision, viewing behavior and memory.
I am especially interested in how we perceive and memorize space, and how our knowledge about the world shapes the way we see and interact with it.
I address these questions using neuroimaging and eye tracking combined with psychophysical and virtual reality experiments. My work is complemented by machine learning to characterize brain activity in sensory and memory regions and how they interact. I also enjoy methods development to push the boundaries of how we study these processes altogether. Read more about my research here.
This is a personal website and I do not represent the NIH here
Since 11/2020 - Postdoctoral researcher
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Laboratory of Brain and Cognition (LBC), Bethesda, MD, USA.
PI: Christopher I. Baker
01/2020 - 10/2020 - Postdoctoral researcher
Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Centre for Neural Computation, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway.
PI: Christian F. Doeller
09/2016 - 01/2020 - PhD Candidate
Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Centre for Neural Computation, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway.
PI: Christian F. Doeller
04/2016 - 08/2016 - Research Assistant
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition & Behaviour, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
PI: Christian F. Doeller
11/2014 - 03/2016 - Research Assistant
Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, Tübingen, Germany.
PI: Andreas Bartels
11/2014 - Master of Science
Neurobiology, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
Since 04/2019 - Guest researcher
Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
11/2014 - 03/2016 - Guest researcher
Max-Planck-Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany.
*Shared-first author, † Shared-senior author
Frey M.*, Nau M.*†, Doeller C.F.† (2020).
MR-based camera-less eye tracking using deep neural networks.
bioRxiv
Nau M., Navarro Schröder T., Frey M., Doeller C.F. (2020).
Behavior-dependent directional tuning in the human visual-navigation network.
Nature Communications
Frey M., Nau M. (2020). Memory efficient brain tumor segmentation using an autoencoder-regularized U-Net. Springer:
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Nau M. (2020).
Perception & the cognitive map: deriving a stable world from visual inputs.
Dissertation - NTNU Open
Bellmund J.L.S., Ruiter T.A., Nau M., Doeller C.F. (2020).
Deforming the metric of cognitive maps distorts memory.
Nature Human Behavior
Navarro Schröder T., Towse B.W., Nau M., Burgess N., Barry C., Doeller C.F. (2020).
Environmental anchoring of grid-like representations minimizes spatial uncertainty during navigation.
BioRxiv
Frey M., Tanni S., Perrodin C., O'Leary A., Nau M. Kelly J., Banino, A., Doeller C.F., Barry, C. (2019).
DeepInsight: a general framework for interpreting wide-band neural activity.
BioRxiv
Nau M. (2019).
Functional imaging of the medial temporal lobe -
A neuroscientist's guide to fMRI pulse sequence optimization.
Open Science Framework
Nau M.* & Julian J.B.*, Doeller C.F. (2018).
How the brain's navigation system shapes our visual experience.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Featured cover article
Nau M., Navarro Schröder T., Bellmund J.L.S., Doeller C.F. (2018).
Hexadirectional coding of visual space in human entorhinal cortex.
Nature Neuroscience
News & Views article by Killian N.J. & Buffalo E.A.
Nau M., Schindler A., Bartels A. (2018).
Real-motion signals in human early visual cortex.
NeuroImage
The medial temporal lobe (MTL) is difficult to image with fMRI due to magnetic field inhomogeneities and low signal-to-noise ratios.
Here, I compiled some information about fMRI pulse sequences and how they affect your data, along with a few tips on how to get a good signal in the MTL.
Find it here on Open Science Framework!
This code creates, fits & tests an encoding model of virtual head direction using simulated fMRI voxel time courses.
It can be easily adapted for other behavioral domains & imaging techniques (MEG, 2p-imaging...) to study the neural underpinnings of behavior across species.