UNIQUE Excellence Scholarships

UNIQUE Excellence Scholarships

Winter 2021 Competiton

UNIQUE Excellence Scholarships (MSc, PhD and Postdocs)
[Closed competition]

This program aims to promote interdisciplinary research between the fields of artificial intelligence and neuroscience and support training opportunities for master's, doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows. The amount awarded to successful candidates is $10,000 for the master students, $15,000 for Ph.D. students and $20,000 for the postdoctoral fellows, for a one-year non-renewable term. This program is made possible thanks to the FRQNT Research Clusters program and generous support from UNIQUE's institutional and CFREF partners (see list).

For more information on the eligibility criteria (for applicants and their supervisors), the application and evaluation procedures, please refer to the program description and application form above.

Previous UNIQUE Excellence Scholarship Competitions

List of awardees

Winter 2021 Competition

Masters excellence scholarships

Jérémie Gince, Département d'informatique et de génie logiciel, Université Laval
Inférence de la connectivité neuronale à l'aide de séries temporelles d'activité neuronale
Supervisors: Simon Hardy & Patrick Desrosiers

Andréanne Lemay, Génie électrique, Polytechnique Montréal
Modulate learning with conditioning layer for increased generalization
Supervisors: Julien Cohen-Adad & Nikola Stikov

Charlotte Maschke, Integrated Program in Neuroscience, McGill University
Time-resolved functional connectivity from high-density EEG for characterizing dynamic principles in human consciousness
Supervisors: Stefanie Blain-Moraes & Karim Jerbi

Albert Michaud Gagnon, Département de génie électrique et de génie informatique, Université Laval
Optimisation automatisée de paramètres de nanoscopie optique appliquée à la caractérisation de dégénérescence mitochondriale dans des modèles de Parkinson
Supervisors: Flavie Lavoie-Cardinal & Audrey Durand

Sarthak Mittal, Département de mathématiques et de statistique, Université de Montréal
Leveraging Cognitive Inductive Biases for Perception and Memory
Supervisors: Guillaume Lajoie & Yoshua Bengio

Doctoral excellence scholarships

Anthony Bilodeau, Département de biochimie, microbiologie et bio-informatique, Université Laval
Probabilistic generative model for protein-specific organization at the spine level
Supervisors: Flavie Lavoie-Cardinal & Audrey Durand

Catherine Bouchard, Département de génie électrique et de génie informatique, Université Laval
Génération de séquences d’imagerie par résonance magnétique à partir de scans de tomodensitométrie
Supervisors: Christian Gagné & Flavie Lavoie-Cardinal

Saeideh Davoudi, Département de Neurosciences, Université de Montréal
Maturational specificities of EEG- a machine learning approach
Supervisors: Sarah Lippé & Karim Jerbi

Giancarlo Kerg, Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal
Causal reasoning and out-of-distribution generalization in sequential tasks
Supervisors: Yoshua Bengio & Guillaume Lajoie

Xiaoxuan Lei, Department of Physiology, McGill University
Validity of Memory-Augmented Neural Network models (MANN) in Neuroscience
Supervisors: Pouya Bashivan & Pierre Bellec

Mandana Samiei, School of Computer Science, McGill University
Knowledge Transfer in Reinforcement Learning using Hippocampal-Inspired Features
Supervisors: Blake Richards & Doina Precup

Ezekiel Williams, Département de mathématiques et de statistique, Université de Montréal
Analysis of Learning Dynamics in Recurrent Neural Networks
Supervisors: Guillaume Lajoie & Blake Richards

Postdoctoral research funding

Jérôme Dockès, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University
Fighting sample biases : generalizable and fair learning from neuroscience data
Supervisors: Jean-Baptiste Poline & Gaël Varoquaux

Graham Little, Département d'informatique, Université de Sherbrooke
Advanced Diffusion MRI Tractography Using an Adversarial Generative Neural Network Combined with Neuroanatomical Priors
Supervisors: Maxime Descoteaux & Hervé Lombaert

Désirée Lussier-Lévesque, Centre de recherche de l'Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal, Université de Montréal
Characterization of inter-site and scanner variability in big resting-state functional imaging data using precision graph neural networks
Supervisors: Pierre Bellec & Simon Duchesne

Tyler Peel, Département de Neurosciences, Université de Montréal
Neural mechanisms of decision-making and motor control during learning
Supervisors: Paul Cisek & Andrea Green

Theresa Wiesner, Faculté des sciences et de génie, Université Laval
Machine learning approach for online automated multimodal super-resolution imaging to investigate synaptic plasticity
Supervisors: Flavie Lavoie-Cardinal & Christian Gagné

Winter 2020 Competition

Masters excellence scholarships

Geneviève Chafouleas, Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal
Machine Learning for Early Diagnosis of Mild Cognitive Impairment
Supervisors: Philippe Langlais & Simona Maria Brambati

Anthony G.X. Chen, Computer Science, McGill University
Hippocampal-Inspired Replay for Efficient Reinforcement Learning
Supervisors: Blake Richards, Joelle Pineau

Timothy Nest, Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal
Leveraging machine learning for electrophysiological research
Supervisors: Karim Jerbi & Bratislav Misic

Olivier Vincent, Génie biomédical, Polytechnique Montréal
Development of innovative deep learning architectures with prior knowledge from MRI physics to generalize medical image segmentation
Supervisors: Julien Cohen-Adad & Sarah Lippé

Doctoral excellence scholarships

Cesar Augusto Canaveral, Département de Neurosciences, Université de Montréal
The study of decision-making while in action
Supervisors: Paul Cisek & Andrea Green

Raymond Chua, Computer Science, McGill University
Replay using Successor Representation for Reinforcement Learning
Supervisors: Doina Precup & Blake Richards

Elizabeth DuPre, Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, McGill University
Functional alignment as a method to improve training in biologically-inspired artificial neural networks.
Supervisors: Jean-Baptiste Poline & Pierre Bellec

Samuel Laferriere Cyr, Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal
How do monkeys learn BCIs: parsing learning using dimensionality reduction techniques
Supervisors: Guillaume Lajoie & Blake Richards

François Paugam, Département d’informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal
Modélisation de dynamiques cérébrales par réseaux de neurones
Supervisors: Pierre Bellec & Guillaume Lajoie

Emmanuelle Renaud, Département d’informatique, Université de Sherbrooke
Human brain fiber tractography using machine learning
Supervisors: Maxime Descoteaux & Hugo Larochelle

Laura Suarez, Department of Neuroimaging and neuroinformatics, McGill University
Reverse-engineering the connectome.
Supervisors: Bratislav Misic & Guillaume Lajoie

Theresa Wiesner, Faculté des sciences et de génie, Université Laval
Deep learning approach to predict spatial and functional association of synaptic proteins
Supervisors: Paul De Koninck & Flavie Lavoie-Cardinal

Postdoctoral research funding

Pouya Bashivan, Computer Science/Mila, Université de Montréal
A recurrent model of primate vision with concurrent inference and reconstruction paths
Supervisors: Irina Rish & Blake Richards

Peer Herholz, Montréal Neurological Institute & Hospital, Medicine, McGill University
Musiconoid Andriod - comparing music representations in biological and artificial neural networks
Supervisors: Jean-Baptiste Poline & Karim Jerbi

Damjan Kalajdzievski, Département d’informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal
Predicted Equilibrium Propagation
Supervisors: Yoshua Bengio & Blake Richards

Anne-Lise Saive, Département de psychologie, Université de Montréal
Decoding the neural dynamics of human memory optimization using machine learning
Supervisors: Karim Jerbi & Dang Nguyen.