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Ann Hermundstad is interested in the strategies animals and their brains use to make sense of their surroundings and guide behavior. To link sensation and action efficiently and flexibly, the brain uses abstract internal representations that preserve information about important environmental features and expected outcomes of behavior. Hermundstad and her team seek to understand the principles by which such representations are built, modified, and used to achieve desirable behavioral goals in the face of uncertainty and change. The team combines theoretical and computational approaches to decipher the neural dynamics that capture information about an animal’s relationship to its sensory surroundings, and to explore how these dynamics relate to behavior.