Nicholas Steinmetz
Associate Professor
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNicholas Steinmetz is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington with 11 years of experience studying perceptual decision making, vision, and population-level neural coordination. Trained at Stanford (Ph.D.) and UPenn (BSE), he combines hands-on electrophysiology, calcium imaging, optogenetics, psychophysics, and advanced data analysis to link single-neuron dynamics to behavior. He has a strong record of translational tool-building for neurophysiology—contributing back-end fixes to phy, GUI and visualization work for the widely used Kilosort spike-sorting suite, and MATLAB tools for NumPy interoperability—reflecting a rare blend of experimental and software craftsmanship. Based in Seattle, he runs lab efforts that integrate large-scale data acquisition with reproducible analysis pipelines, and is known for smoothing edge-case bugs that improve community tools for high-throughput electrophysiology.
11 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science and Engineering (BSE) Bioengineering, Bachelor of Science and Engineering (BSE) Bioengineering at University of PennsylvaniaDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Neuroscience, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Neuroscience at Stanford University
Github Skills (26)
python10
electrophysiology10
data-serialization10
matlab10
user-interface10
ui-design10
graphical-user-interface10
numpy10
serialization10
deserialization10
front-end-development10
fileio10
file-handling10
file-processing10
file-access10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
kwikteam/npy-matlab
Sep 2015 - Jan 2023
Experimental code to read/write NumPy .NPY files in MATLAB
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:26 commits, 3 PRs, 24 pushes in 7 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Nicholas primarily contributed to the development of a MATLAB library for reading and writing NumPy `.npy` files. They implemented the `readNPY` function, added support for 1D and 2D array formats, and created a test suite. The user also refactored the code by abstracting header reading into a separate function and added an example demonstrating memory mapping functionality.
matlabnumpy
MouseLand/Kilosort
May 2018 - Apr 2020
Fast spike sorting with drift correction
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:74 commits, 2 PRs, 17 pushes in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Nicholas appears to be primarily focused on developing the graphical user interface (GUI) for the Kilosort software, as evidenced by the commit messages and the changes to the `ksGUI.m` and `kilosort.m` files. Their contributions include adding and positioning GUI elements such as panels, buttons, text fields, and axes for data and probe visualization. They also implement basic functionality like file selection, and adding interactive features such as scrolling and clicking behaviors within the data and probe view.
neurosciencerustspike-sortingsortingchannels
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