I am a neuroscientist and psychiatrist with the goal of understanding brain mechanisms related to both neuropsychiatric disease and to healthy brain function. My approach use advanced neuroscientific tools that give insight into neural circuit function in relation behavior. I trained under Drs. Rafael Yuste and Gyorgy Buzsaki and have expertise in cortical and hippocampal dynamics during sleep, wake and learning.
In my laboratory we combine cutting edge techniques with biological approaches to study factors impacting mental health including sleep, stress, psychotropic medications, social interaction and circadian rhythms. We record active neural networks in awake and freely behaving rodents using multi-electrode arrays to capture the activity of multiple neurons at once. We record these during wake and sleep and answer questions regarding how both wake and sleep shape and alter network dynamics – either adaptively in healthy animals or how disease models differ from the healthy state. We also use neural network-based machine vision to automatically score behavior states.
We often apply these methods over periods of time much longer than most researchers – spanning days, weeks or even months of time uninterrupted. We therefore gather large amounts of brain+behavior data and analyze that both ourselves and in conjuction with big data analytics specialists.