Welcome

Obligatory Alex Grey art.
Berkeley!
Carson McNeil is a Data Scientist, Consultant, and Researcher specializing in medical imaging, neuroscience, and machine learning applications. With a background in both computational neuroscience and software engineering, Carson has planned and executed on high-impact projects at Verily Life Sciences, Google, and the University of California, Berkeley. His work bridges cutting-edge machine vision and deep learning techniques with practical applications in health, such as the development of generative models for digital pathology. Carson's work has spanned basic research in the cognitive neuroscience of human vision, the neuroscience of Buddhist meditative states, and many practical applications of machine learning to diagnostic healthcare problems. His research is driven by a desire to improve human health, happiness, and flourishing, whether mental or physical. He believes in driving forward practical technologies while sharing and publishing relevant scientific findings with the world.

Carson has a long-running interest in Mysticism, and believes that there is not such a difference between the tools we think of as "therapeutic", and millenia-old mystical traditions such as Buddhism and Daoism. A culture, such as ours, which is overly materialistic and has lost touch with the subjective, the natural, and the ritualistic, is at risk of collapsing under its own weight. Carson hopes that his teaching, writing, and research will help bridge this divide, and make esoteric mysticism more legible to the rationally-minded scientist.

We rarely hear the inner music, but we are all dancing to it nonetheless.
- Rumi
Please do reach out if you are interested in research collaboration, coaching, or consultation!

Research and Teaching

I have two Neuroscience degrees (Caltech BA 2013, UC Berkeley Masters 2019). I have also worked as a researcher and Data Scientist at Google Machine Intelligence, YouTube, and Verily Life Sciences. My research interests span medical imaging, neuroscience, machine intelligence, and Dharma science.

Autofluorescence Microscopy

While at Verily, I worked on the Virtual Stainer project. We used generative learning to predict histological stains from autofluorescence scans of unstained tissue. See (McNeil et al., 2024), in Modern Pathology, and other publications.

Medical Image Embedding

I worked on a project to use Masked-Siamese Networks to embed colonscopy videos in a semi-supervised way. See (Shor, McNeil et al., 2024)

Functional Neuroanatomy

While at Berkeley, I was in the Gallant Lab within the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research org, working on fMRI research projects to model the human visual system.

Human Emotion

While at Google Machine Intelligence, I kicked off a collaboration between Google and Berkeley to study emotion in human faces using DNNs. 5 years later, this collaboration produced (Cowen et al. 2021) in Nature. I have an ongoing interest in emotion and mental health.

Creative Content

Scienctific work is creative work. But I have also produced a lot of more casual content.

YouTube Lectures

I have several long-form talks on psycho-spiritual frameworks on my YouTube Channel. These were given at a private event, and due to popular acclaim, I posted them online. Perhaps more on this theme will follow.

Essays

I write essays sometimes, which I post to my Substack. The topics range between philosophy, poetic, light research projects, and psychology. For example:

Wedding Ritual Design for a Pluralistic Society by Carson

A recollection of, and guide to, hand-crafting a syncretic, modern, and personal wedding ceremony.

Read on Substack

Flirtations with Death by Carson

Necro-posting an old note from my Medium with some extra explication on the macabre.

Read on Substack

A Gradual Training in Teetotalism

The Greek word “pharmakon”, from which we derive “pharmaceutical” was a word that meant, synonymously, either “medicine” or “poison”. In Chinese, the expression 吃药三分毒 means roughly, “all medicine is 30% poison” …

ADHD: Steroids, The Gym, and The Game

The Game is changing, and this is twice as true on college campuses, where the amphetamine black market is booming … Given my own experience and that of friends, I was surprised to see the positive effects [of meditation] were so mild, until I saw the meditation protocols. … Would you go to the gym for 5 minutes a day and expect any sort of change?

Contact

This contact form will send to a tagged place in my email, where I am likely to see and respond to it.