Appointments
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Postdoc (Machine Learning) — Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabrück University2022–2026
Advisor: Tim Kietzmann -
Postdoc (Cognitive Neuroscience) — MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University2026 (incoming)
Research focus
- Active, naturalistic vision via self-supervised, predictive agents.
- Brain alignment: mechanistic and representational tests (visual system; scenes & objects).
- Developmental curricula for robust generalization.
- Continual learning and functional drift in task-relevant / null subspaces.
Highlights
- Glimpse Prediction Networks (GPN) — action-conditioned prediction during eye movements yields scene representations aligned with human visual cortex. (arXiv, 2025; under review at Science Advances)
- Developmental visual diet (DVD) for robust vision — human-like coarse-to-fine training yields more robust, shape-based AI vision. (arXiv, 2025; in press at Nature Machine Intelligence)
- Functional drift for continual learning — keep readouts stable while representations move in the null space to support new learning. (CoLLAs, 2024)
- Animacy organization in human VTC — visual categorizability and perceived agency explain independent components of the animacy continuum. (eLife, 2019)
More: projects, code, and writeups (sushrutthorat.com/work).
Education
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PhD, Cognitive Neuroscience — Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University2017–2022
Advisors: Marius Peelen, Marcel van Gerven
Thesis: Investigations into human visual search in structured environments -
MSc (cum laude), Cognitive Neuroscience — CIMeC, University of Trento2015–2017
Advisor: Marius Peelen
Thesis: CNN-based analyses of visual features & animacy representations -
BTech, Engineering Physics — IIT Bombay2011–2015
Advisor: Bipin Rajendran
Thesis: Quadcopter flight control using modular Spiking Neural Networks
Recognition & service
- MSCA Seal of Excellence (92.6%) — postdoctoral proposal on modeling human visual development (2025)
- Reviewer — journals & conferences including Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Communications, Science Advances, NeurIPS, ICLR, eLife, …
- Supervision — 14 BSc, 3 MSc, 3 PhD students