Rice and Baylor College of Medicine Assistant Professor Xaq Pitkow has received an NSF CAREER award for his project "Distributed Nonlinear Neural Computation." The project will develop new quantitative theories that explain brain function as distributed nonlinear neural computations that implement principles of statistical reasoning. To test these theories, he is collaborating with experimentalists to design and interpret neuroscience experiments that quantify both what information about naturalistic tasks is encoded in neural populations and what aspects of that information are actually decoded.