Maxine Levesque

Background

About Maxine Levesque

I study neuroscience and mental health with a mathematical lens; that’s taken me from mapping real-time human brain activity during speech in the OR, to decoding the invisible flickers of calcium in astrocytes, the mysterious “dark matter” of the brain, to using language models to better understand what’s happening inside someone’s mind based on what they write online. My PhD work focused on unifying notions of relational understanding and computation across neurons, non-neuronal brain cells, aneural organisms, and artificial agents. As a clinician-scientist, I want to help build new tools in psychiatry that empower people to change the understanding within their own mind. Neuroscience and psychology—both new and old—show us so clearly that this internal understanding is the foundation shaping the unique lived world of each person. Changing the world within has an incredible transformative power.