Hello, and welcome to my website! My name is Matthew Keaton.
As you may or may not have noticed, the webpage you are currently visiting is my first ever blog post — if you haven’t yet, please have a look at the “About” page linked above for a proper self introduction and guide to this website.
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Ok, welcome back! Now that you know my background and interests, let me explain the intentions of this blog series and some details on what I would like to cover.
The chief purpose of this blog is for self development. As I prepare myself for a PhD and career in computational neuroscience, I feel it will be valuable to get a head start on learning important, foundational concepts related to the budding field of computational neuroscience as well as neuroscience more broadly. I also would like to fine-tune my capabilities to speak (and write) publicly on difficult yet important topics in research, as I have a personal aspiration to one day communicate — sometimes advocating for and, likely, sometimes warning against — breakthroughs in the areas of neuroscience and machine learning, as both continue to increase their impact on the public and common good. Both my knowledge of neuroscience and ability to convey technical details, while I have already garnered a solid base through various means, are things I believe I will further sharpen during my graduate education and beyond. However, while I have the time to focus my efforts with a higher level of freedom, I have decided to begin to move the needle in a manner that is unique and motivating in a number of ways.
In pursuit of both of these goals, I aim to present a cogent, easy to understand set of articles which, following the constraints I have set for myself, will hopefully be both engaging and informative. I intend to publish as often as I can over the course of the final semester of my master’s degree (which begins today), although this will be dependent on my level of occupation with many things I intend to wrap up soon. Each article will be independent of the others and be able to stand on its own, although some groundbreaking work will likely build on topics discussing the more foundational research.
I am very excited to start working on this project, and I hope that you will come away with something from each of these posts as well.
— M