Jenelle Feather

Timeline

1. By 2013

   From Pennsylvania to MIT

   She grows up in rural Pennsylvania and becomes the first person in her family to attend college. In 2013, she earns undergraduate degrees in physics and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT.

2. 2016–2020

   A DOE graduate fellowship

   Before graduate school, she works as a technical assistant in MIT’s Kanwisher Lab. In 2016, as a first-year PhD student in the UC Berkeley–UCSF Graduate Program in Bioengineering, she receives a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, which runs through 2020.

3. 2019

   Metamers of neural networks

   At NeurIPS in 2019, she is first author of a study using model metamers: synthetic sounds and images that produce model responses matching those of natural examples. Human participants generally cannot recognize metamers generated to match the networks’ deepest layers.

4. 2020–2021

   A McGovern graduate fellowship

   In 2020–2021, she is a Friends of the McGovern Institute Fellow and a graduate student in Josh McDermott’s lab at MIT. Her work examines auditory textures, such as rain, wind and fire, and builds artificial neural networks to model how people perceive sound.

5. 2022–2023

   MIT doctorate and Flatiron research

   In 2022, she completes a PhD in brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, working in the Laboratory for Computational Audition with Josh McDermott. By 2023, she is a research fellow at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Neuroscience, working with SueYeon Chung and Eero Simoncelli.

6. October 2023

   Model metamers in Nature Neuroscience

   She is lead author of “Model metamers reveal divergent invariances between biological and artificial neural networks,” published in Nature Neuroscience in October 2023. The study shows that many sounds and images created to match a neural network’s responses to natural inputs are unrecognizable to people.

7. December 2023

   Neural networks as hearing models

   In December 2023, she and Greta Tuckute are the lead authors of a PLOS Biology study comparing deep neural networks with responses in the human auditory cortex. Models trained on several tasks and with background noise produce representations closer to those observed in brain scans.

8. Since 2025

   A perception lab at CMU

   She joins Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Institute as an assistant professor in 2025. She leads the Laboratory for Computational Perception. In June 2026, her lab builds and tests models of hearing and vision, and extends the model metamer framework to auditory event categorization.