Lakshmi Govindarajan

I study how we hear and see the world. Currently, I am an ICoN Postdoctoral Associate at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT working with Josh McDermott and Ila Fiete.

I received my PhD in 2022 from Brown University in Cognitive Science advised by Thomas Serre. During that time I was a Carney Graduate Fellow as part of the Robert J. & Nancy D. Carney Institute for Brain Science, a DARPA Riser, and received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching. My dissertation was on Attractor dynamics in large-scale recurrent neural networks [Video].

Before graduate school, I worked in industry in a Statistics and Machine Learning group at A*STAR (Singapore) following undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Biophysics from National University of Singapore.

news

Mar 13, 2026	🚨 New paper out in Nature Biomedical Engineering We report on AI-guided neuromodulation in humans with spinal cord injury, showing how machine learning can personalize electrical stimulation of the spinal cord to restore ability to move limbs, receive sensory feedback. Incredibly proud of this interdisciplinary team and the years of work that made this possible. Paper + Press release now available.
Nov 13, 2025	📢 Abstract accepted to ARO2025 as a podium presentation.
Nov 02, 2025	New preprint from my postdoctoral work on sensory uncertainty and human confidence in naturalistic auditory perception.
Aug 21, 2025	Invited to be a discussion leader at the Raynor Cerebellum Project summit.
Aug 07, 2025	A fun social-media feature by the McGovern Institute 👯

selected publications

bioRxiv

Task-optimized models of sensory uncertainty reproduce human confidence judgments

Lakshmi Narasimhan Govindarajan, Sagarika Alavilli, and Josh McDermott

2025

Bib PDF

@misc{uncertainty25,
  title = {Task-optimized models of sensory uncertainty reproduce human confidence judgments},
  author = {Govindarajan, Lakshmi Narasimhan and Alavilli, Sagarika and McDermott, Josh},
  year = {2025},
  volume = {10.1101/2025.10.31.685933},
}

NeurIPS

Flexible context-driven sensory processing in dynamical vision models

Lakshmi Narasimhan Govindarajan, Abhiram Iyer, Valmiki Kothare, and Ila Fiete

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024

Bib PDF

@article{govindarajan2024flexible,
  title = {Flexible context-driven sensory processing in dynamical vision models},
  author = {Govindarajan, Lakshmi Narasimhan and Iyer, Abhiram and Kothare, Valmiki and Fiete, Ila},
  journal = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  volume = {37},
  pages = {3832--3856},
  year = {2024},
}

NeurIPS

Computing a human-like reaction time metric from stable recurrent vision models

Lore Goetschalckx^*, Lakshmi Narasimhan Govindarajan^*, Alekh Karkada Ashok, Aarit Ahuja, David Sheinberg, and 1 more author

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024

Bib HTML PDF

@article{goetschalckx2024computing,
  title = {Computing a human-like reaction time metric from stable recurrent vision models},
  author = {Goetschalckx, Lore and Govindarajan, Lakshmi Narasimhan and Karkada Ashok, Alekh and Ahuja, Aarit and Sheinberg, David and Serre, Thomas},
  journal = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  volume = {36},
  year = {2024},
}

J. Neural Eng.

Fast inference of spinal neuromodulation for motor control using amortized neural networks

Lakshmi Narasimhan Govindarajan, Jonathan S Calvert, Samuel R Parker, Minju Jung, Radu Darie, and 4 more authors

Journal of neural engineering, 2022

Nature BME

Perilesional neuromodulation replaces lost sensorimotor function in persons with spinal cord injury

Jonathan Calvert, Samuel R. Parker, Lakshmi Narasimhan Govindarajan, Radu Darie, Elias Shaaya, and 20 more authors

Nature Biomedical Engineering, 2026

Bib HTML PDF

@article{calvert2025perilesional,
  title = {Perilesional neuromodulation replaces lost sensorimotor function in persons with spinal cord injury},
  author = {Calvert, Jonathan and Parker, Samuel R. and Govindarajan, Lakshmi Narasimhan and Darie, Radu and Shaaya, Elias and Solinsky, Ryan and Del Valle, Lily M. and Miranda, Priyanka and Jang, Jaeson and Tiwari, Ekta and Syed, Sohail and Villalobos, Raymond M. and Aguiar, Liza M. and Taylor, Andrew J. and Tang, Hanlin and McPherson, Sean and Xue, Wenzhe and Carayannopoulos, Alexios G. and Oyelese, Adetokunbo A. and Gokaslan, Ziya L. and Bansal, Arjun K. and Resnik, Linda J. and Serre, Thomas and Fridley, Jared S. F and Borton, David A.},
  journal = {Nature Biomedical Engineering},
  year = {2026},
}