Ongoing Research
Ongoing Research
Interdisciplinary Research Opportunities
We follow a particular research pedagogy, and we bring this approach to our work with incoming trainees. Under our research pedagogy, our trainees develop capabilities to read and address their social realities and apply this posture to develop their fundamental scientific research questions. The area of research can range from the physical sciences to the biological and social sciences. We are currently capable of conducting research in the following areas of research:
- Neuroscience and psychology
- Exploring the mechanistic role the brain plays in enabling flexible cognitive and perceptual behavior in healthy and neurological populations across diverse cultures.
- Medical Anthropology
- How do we recognize and identify the true exigencies of a community of people? Who is a protagonist in such an inquiry? How do we develop methods of consultative epistemology in a community of people to identify and solve social challenges?
Vision rehabilitation
Informed by mechanistic insight from neuroscience
Millions of children worldwide live with low vision — visual impairment that cannot be corrected with glasses. While perceptual training can improve visual function, a longstanding challenge is that these improvements rarely generalize beyond the specific images or tasks used during training. As a result, translating this knowledge into real-world applications for treating low vision has remained limited.
Relevant publications:
- Cortical visual impairment at birth can be improved rapidly by vision training in adulthood: A case study by Pandey, Neupane et al, 2023
- Perceptual-Cognitive Training Paradigms for Understanding Cognition and Cortical Visual Impairments by Pandey, Shrestha, Neupane, 2024
- Mental Navigation in the primate entorhinal cortex by Neupane et al, 2024
Our research aims to overcome this limitation by understanding how the developing brain learns to generalize. We are pursuing two complementary approaches. First, we use brain recordings from the primate visual system (open datasets and collaborations with primate labs) to develop biologically informed artificial intelligence models that generate training images optimized to yield broader improvements in visual function. Second, we combine perceptual training with cognitive tasks that engage the brain's general-purpose learning and memory circuits, aiming to extend perceptual improvements on trained stimuli to new objects. Together, these approaches seek to go beyond improvements in laboratory tasks to the restoration of meaningful visual function in everyday life, such as reading and face recognition.
Seeking Funding
We seek funding for trainee salaries and collaboration with experts in machine learning who are interested in addressing marginalized social issues.
Ethnography to uncover unexplored neurological diseases in rural populations
This research endeavor takes a cross-disciplinary approach, first by combining methodologies (ethnography and participatory research methods) to map the landscape of neurological and psychological burden a rural population may be facing.
Motivated by our initial observation of the prevalence of cortical blindness in low-income populations, we aim to apply social-scientific methods to identify potential hidden medical conditions and to motivate new research questions for cross-disciplinary inquiry.
We seek funding for trainee salaries and fieldwork expenses.
PapersExplained: Making Scientific Papers Readable
Despite the rapid growth of open-access publishing, scientific papers remain difficult to understand for many students entering scientific research. Reading a paper requires far more than understanding technical terms — it requires following the logic behind the study, grasping the historical context and prevailing discourses, and learning from the decisions, setbacks, and insights that rarely appear in the final story.
PapersExplained is an open platform that helps bridge this gap. Starting from an AI-assisted expansion of an article, authors can enrich their own papers with the reasoning, technical innovations, failed attempts, and lessons learned throughout the research process. Interactive figures, jargon explanations, historical context, and direct author–reader discussions transform a static publication into a learning resource.
This idea originally emerged during Coherent Research's experience in research capacity development in Nepal. The idea has organically evolved into a platform that aims to democratize scientific understanding by making expert thinking — not just scientific results — accessible to anyone interested in learning how research is done.
We seek seed funding to make our beta platform a publicly available free resource.
