J. Quinn Lee
About
Appointed Canada CIFAR AI Chair – 2025
Quinn Lee is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Alberta and Fellow at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), where he leads the Navigation and Memory Systems Laboratory. He combines cutting-edge methods for high-yield neural and behavioural recording to understand how we learn and remember in changing environments. Toward this end, his group leverages machine learning both as a tool for neuroscientific data analysis and theoretical modelling. Current focus areas in the group surround how systems interactions in the brain and model systems produce sparse, adaptive neural representations for navigation and memory. Lee aims to further generate brain-inspired solutions for areas such as representation learning, sparse coding networks, and reinforcement learning.
Awards
- Postdoctoral Fellowship, Canadian Institutes of Health Research (2022)
- Postdoctoral Fellowship, Fonds de recherche du Québec – Santé (2019)
- Canada Graduates Scholarship – Doctoral, Alexander Graham Bell Award, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (2018)
Relevant Publications
- Lee, J.Q., Keinath, A.T., Cianfarano, E., & Brandon, M.P. (2025). “Identifying representational structure in CA1 to benchmark theoretical models of cognitive mapping.” Neuron, 113, pp. 307–320.
- Gomez, D., Bowling, M., Lee, J.Q., & Machado, M.C. (2025). “Representations in the hippocampal-entorhinal system emerge from learning sensory predictions.” bioRxiv.
- Lee, J.Q., Nielsen, M., McHugh, R., Morgan, E., Hong, N., Sutherland, R.J., & McDonald, R.J. (2025). “Sparsity of population activity in the hippocampus is task-invariant across the trisynaptic circuit and dorsoventral axis.” Hippocampus, 35(1).
- Lee, J.Q., & Brandon, M.P. (2023). “Time and experience are independent determinants of representational drift in CA1.” Neuron, 111(15), pp. 2275-2277.
- Lee, J.Q., Zelinski, E., McDonald, R.J., & Sutherland, R.J. (2016). “Heterarchic reinstatement of long-term memory: A concept on hippocampal amnesia in rodent memory research.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 71, pp. 154-166.