Emily Mackevicius

About

I am a scientist working at the intersection of neuroscience, animal behavior, AI, and urban ecology. I am a senior research scientist at Basis Research Institute, where I lead the Collaborative Intelligent Systems group. My research asks how intelligence emerges in social groups navigating complex, changing environments, and how computational models can help uncover the latent strategies, preferences, and environmental pressures shaping collective behavior.

My background is in systems neuroscience and computational ethology. During my PhD in Michael Fee’s lab at MIT, I studied how juvenile songbirds learn the temporal structure of song, combining theoretical modeling, neural recordings, and machine learning approaches for analyzing large-scale neural activity. My work focused on how neural circuits generate and rehearse precisely timed sequences during learning, and contributed to the development of seqNMF, a method for discovering repeated neural sequences in high-dimensional datasets.

I later studied memory formation in the hippocampus of food-caching birds, developing experimental systems to record neural activity during naturalistic caching and retrieval behavior. This work explored how animals form and use episodic-like memories in complex environments, and helped motivate my broader interest in biological strategies for one-shot learning, navigation, and world modeling.

My current research combines multimodal sensing, computer vision, probabilistic modeling, and dynamical systems approaches to study social behavior across species. Recent projects include computational analyses of coordinated movement and ultrasonic communication in New York City rats, methods for inferring latent strategies from groups of animals in natural environments, and development of non-invasive tools for urban ecological monitoring. I am particularly interested in social intelligence, collective behavior, and the relationship between environmental structure and behavior.

More broadly, I am motivated by the idea that understanding collective intelligence – in animals, ecosystems, and human societies – is increasingly important in a rapidly changing world.