Jean-Paul Noel
University of Minnesota
Biography
Jean-Paul Noel is assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. His lab studies how the brain infers hidden causes from sensory observations and how this 'causal inference' process can break down in psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions. The group bridges large-scale single-cell recordings in awake, behaving rodents with VR-based scalp EEG in humans, using computational modelling to link the two levels. Noel was a Fulbright Scholar at EPFL, completed his Ph.D. in neuroscience at Vanderbilt University and trained as a postdoc at New York University before launching his independent lab in Minnesota.
Research Interests
- multisensory integration
- spatial navigation
- active sensing
- body ownership
- vestibular processing
SCENE Teams
Featured Publications
The Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience: Studying how the brain interacts with the world
Angelaki DE, Batista A, Fitzgerald T, Kominsky JF, Lengyel M, Mathis A, Mathis MW, Moss CF, Niell CM, Noel JP, Pitkow X, Rothkopf CA, Savin C, Stachenfeld K, Suthana N, Tolias A, Ulanovsky N, Wolpert DM, Wong A, Zimmermann J
Neuron, 2026 · DOI (opens in new tab) · Preprint (PDF) (opens in new tab)
Neural and computational correlates of strategic aborting and long-run policy optimization in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
Noel JP, Zhang R, Pitkow X, Angelaki DE
Nature Communications, 2026 · DOI (opens in new tab) · Preprint (PDF) (opens in new tab)
From peripersonal space to cognitive maps: An evolutionary perspective
Anjum S, Sosa MJ, Serino A, Noel JP
Progress in Neurobiology, 2026 · DOI (opens in new tab)