How do researchers make sense of the mountains of data collected from recording the simultaneous activity of hundreds of neurons? Neuroscientists all over the world rely on Kilosort, software that enables them to tease apart spikes from individual neurons to understand how the brain's cells and circuits work together to process information.
Kilosort has become indispensable for many neuroscientists, but it may never have been developed if Pachitariu hadn't decided he wanted to try something new. In the first year of his postdoc, Pachitariu developed the initial version of Kilosort. The software, which was 50 times faster than previous approaches, allowed researchers to process the millions of data points generated by the Neuropixels probes. Eight years later, the probes and the software are staples in neuroscience labs worldwide, allowing researchers to identify and classify the spikes of individual neurons.
"Every now and then, I can put a few months into spearheading a new version and writing new code," he says.