Mackenzie Weygandt Mathis


Mackenzie W. Mathis, is an American neuroscientist and principal investigator at the Rowland Institute at Harvard University. Her lab investigates the neural basis of adaptive motor behaviors in mice to inform future translational research in neurological diseases.

Early life and education

Mathis conducted her undergraduate education at the University of Oregon receiving a bachelors of science in 2007. She then worked as a senior research technician and lab manager at the Project A.L.S. Laboratory for Stem Cell Research at Columbia University from 2007 to 2012. Working under the mentorship of Dr. Christopher E. Henderson and Dr. Hynek Wichterle, Mathis modelled amyotrophic lateral sclerosis using stem cell-derived motor neurons. During her time in the lab, she published two first author scientific papers, one in the Journal of Neuroscience which offered a novel protocol for generating human limb-innervating neural subtypes in vitro for use in neurological disease research, and the other in Nature Biotechnology on benchmarking iPS stem cell lines ability to make motor neurons. Mathis then moved to Boston and joined the graduate program in molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University. On her way to completing her PhD, she also completed a master's degree. During her PhD, Mathis conducted research on the neural circuits underlying reward prediction errors under the mentorship of Professor Naoshige Uchida at the Harvard Center for Brain Science. In her first year as a graduate student, Mathis received an National Science Foundation Fellowship to fund her graduate research. Mathis was able to merge her interests in motor control with Uchida's expertise in neural recordings and behavioral analysis to forge a new scientific direction in the lab and publish a first author paper in Neuron by the end of her PhD regarding the essential role played by the somatosensory cortex in forelimb motor adaptation in rodents. Near the end of her PhD Mathis was awarded the Rowland Fellowship which provided five years of funding to start her own lab at Harvard's Rowland Institute in Cambridge, MA. Prior to founding the Mathis Lab at Harvard, Mathis was also awarded the Fellowship for Advancement in Brain Science which provided her with the funding to work in Germany under the mentorship of Professor Matthias Bethge at the University of Tübingen. In her postdoctoral work, Mathis focused on pioneering deep learning tools for neural and behavioral analysis which served as a critical step towards her independent career.

Career and research

In 2017, Mathis started her lab at the Rowland Institute at Harvard University with a goal of reverse engineering neural circuits that drive adaptive motor behavior. Through large-scale neural recordings and building novel robotic and machine learning tools, the probes neural circuits and analyzes behavioral outputs to better understand how brain function relates to behavior. Mathis is dedicated to the concept of open science and as such, the novel deep learning tool she designed, in collaboration with Dr. Alexander Mathis, is open access such that researchers worldwide have access to the code in order to use this tool to analyze animal behaviors in an unbiased and precise way to inform a better understanding of how neural activity drives specific behaviors. The deep learning tool designed by Mathis is called which relies on transfer learning to optimize an existing neural network to a desired dataset after sufficient training. Mathis has shown the versatility of this tool on many diverse datasets highlighting the robust design and potential for wide use in fields even beyond neuroscience.
As of 2020, Mathis announced that she would be moving to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, working within the Brain Mind Institute & Center for Neuroprosthetics as a tenure-track professor. The lab will be moving to Campus Biotech in Geneva, Switzerland in the summer of 2020, where Mathis will hold the Bertarelli Foundation Chair of Integrative Neuroscience.

Awards and honors

Mathis is currently married to neuroscientist Dr. Alexander Mathis who also will begin an assistant professorship at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in the summer of 2020.