Claudio Toro-Serey

About me

I’m a Data Scientist at Linus Health working on early prediction of neurodegenerative diseases. Before that I was a Research Fellow in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, working in the Haber Lab at McLean. My doctoral work looked into the sources of individual variability that can get in the way of pinpointing where economic judgments arise in the brain. I then stepped from neuroimaging into neuroanatomy to get a more in depth understanding of the brain’s reward circuitry. When I’m not thinking about the brain, I am either taking care of my daughter or listening to/playing music.

Interests

Decision Making
Brain Networks and Graph Theory
Human Functional Neuroimaging
Neuroanatomy
Open Science

Education

PhD in Psychology, 2021

Boston University
MA in Psychology, 2019

Boston University
BSc in Psychology, 2013

Northern Kentucky University

Published

Toro-Serey, C., Kane, G., & McGuire, J. (2021). Choices favoring cognitive effort in a foraging environment decrease when multiple forms of effort and delay are interleaved. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-021-00972-z

Botvinik-Nezer, R., Holzmeister, F., Camerer, C., Dreber, A., Huber, J., Johannesson, M., … Toro-Serey, C., … & Schonberg, T. (2020). Variability in the analysis of a single neuroimaging dataset by many teams. Nature, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2314-9

Toro-Serey, C., Tobyne, S.M., & McGuire, J.T. (2020) Spectral partitioning identifies individual heterogeneity in the functional network topography of ventral and anterior medial prefrontal cortex. NeuroImage, 205, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.116305

Kadis, D., Dimitrijevic, A., Toro Serey, C., & Holland, S.K. (2016). Characterizing information flux within the distributed pediatric expressive language network – a core region mapped through fMRI-constrained MEG effective connectivity analyses. Brain Connectivity, 6(1). DOI: 10.1089/brain.2015.0374

Horowitz-Kraus, T., Toro Serey, C., & Di Francesco, M. (2015). Increased resting-state functional connectivity in the cingulo-opercular cognitive-control network after intervention in children with reading difficulties. PLoS ONE, 10(7). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0133762

Peer-Reviewed Conference Papers

Toro Serey, C., Bright, I.M., Wyble, B.P., & Howard, M.W. (2019). Rapid Presentation Rate Negatively Impacts the Contiguity Effect in Free Recall. Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (psyArxiv)

Barnes-Davis, M.E., Merhar, S.L., Laue, C., Toro Serey, C., Holland, S.K., & Kadis, D.S. (2017). Extremely preterm children exhibit increased interhemispheric language connectivity in fMRI and MEG. Paper presented at the Annual meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM), Vancouver, Canada.

Cortical Surface Fragmenter

NiBetaSeries (minor help)

Aug 9, 2020 6 min read

How can a highly accurate COVID test be wrong half of the time?

The developing confusion of overly-informed people What’s the problem? Considering base rates. Visualizing the issue Closing The developing confusion of overly-informed people Science is often mistakenly touted as an undeniable collection of facts. But the availability of information about COVID-19 has introduced people to the inevitable uncertainty of scientific discovery. Those not familiar with the process have begun to use this feature as a reason to doubt science as a whole, but complex issues like a pandemic are full of complicated layers that scientists have to navigate and re-evaluate.

Feb 23, 2020 16 min read

Quals prep 1: DDM, Foraging, and Temporal Difference models

A bit of background The Essay References A bit of background I’m finally at the point of my PhD candidacy exam. The way it works in my department at BU is straightforward: you and 3 professors come up with a list of 75 papers (divided into 3 topics, each pertaining to their expertise and related to your research). The exam is to write two essay responses for each set of 25 papers within 2 hours (closed-book, obviously).

May 5, 2019 7 min read

The one with my first hackathon and cortical parcellations.

So you signed up for your first hackathon… Ok ok, but what did you actually work on? Just a tad more So you signed up for your first hackathon… About a year ago I was (luckily) invited to attend Neurohackademy at the University of Washington, Seattle. This was my first time even hearing about hackathons in neuroimaging, so I was definitely excited to check it out. The format of the 2-week event was perfect for me: one week of broad introductions to tools and perspectives that we were encouraged to implement during the second week in collectively-idealized projects.

Feb 4, 2019 3 min read

Modeling Diagnostic Expectations

The biggest appeal of behavioral economics is its promise of practically regularizing the rational expectations imposed by traditional economics. Since the 70s psychology has catalogued increasing amounts of biases and circumstancial heterogeneities that go against the expectation of rationality in decision making. However, in my short years studying it, it seems like these discoveries are seldom applied to complex real-life economic environments (Nudge being a good example of this). That’s what attracted me to ‘A Crisis of Beliefs’, a book by Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer that was published last year.

Nov 29, 2018 12 min read

Secret Santa Generator Shiny App

Why are you doing this? There are enough secret santa services So, how does it work? Shiny implementation Closing Why are you doing this? There are enough secret santa services Last Christmas my wife was left giftless on my side of the family due to a faulty secret santa generator. In trying to earn brownie points the arrogant nerd in me thought he could do better, so I decided to program one in R (I’d rather know exactly what’s going on in the background anyways).

Nothing Fancy