Ralph Peterson

About

I am a postdoctoral research scientist at Basis, where I develop multimodal sensing systems and computational tools for studying animal behavior in natural environments. My current research focuses on the computational urban ecology of NYC rats. I am interested in understanding rat cognition in the natural world: how wild rats communicate, how they coordinate collective behavior, and how they navigate the rich urban environments they share with us. To study these questions, I combine thermal imaging, ultrasonic acoustic recordings, and machine learning to monitor wild populations across NYC and Boston, working alongside municipal partners and pest management organizations.

My broader applied vision is to take basic research and turn it into safe and robust systems that actually work outside the lab. My current research on wild rats is one example. It combines hardware, software, and analysis built alongside municipal and pest management partners who need the system to work reliably in the field. I take inspiration from the Bell Labs model of the technically deep generalist who moves between theory, experiment, engineering, and deployment, and treats the path from scientific idea to working system as a single problem.

Before joining Basis, I completed my PhD in Neural Science at NYU under the supervision of Dan Sanes, David Schneider, and Alex Williams. My PhD research investigated the computational neuroethology of vocal communication in social rodents. I discovered that Mongolian gerbil families have unique vocal dialects that remain stable over weeks (eLife 2024) and built a state-of-the-art deep learning system and first benchmark for localizing rodent vocalizations from multi-channel audio (VCL, NeurIPS 2024). Finally, I identified a novel form of antiphonal ultrasonic communication in gerbils, using wireless electrophysiology and pharmacological inactivation to demonstrate that auditory cortex plays a causal role in this behavior. My dissertation received NYU’s Outstanding Dissertation Award in Science & Technology.

Prior to my PhD, I worked with Alex Wiltschko in the Datta lab at Harvard Medical School, developing computational methods for analyzing mouse behavior and making foundational contributions to MoSeq. I received my B.S. in Behavioral Neuroscience from Northeastern University, where I worked in the lab of Rebecca Shansky.