About Me
I am a 4th year PhD student at Northwestern University. I work with Prof. William Kath in Applied Math on problems in computational neuroscience. We collaborate with Prof. Daniel Dombeck's lab in the department of Neurobiology. Broadly speaking, we study spatial navigation; our "internal GPS system". What is happening in our hippocampus, the memory and learning center of the brain, as we get ourselves from Point A to Point B? I model mouse hippocampal data collected by the lab.
My current research efforts are focused on place cells. These cells are found in the hippocampus, a brain structure known to be responsible for memory and learning. Place cells fire a when an animal is in a specific location, called its place field. I study single cell models in which I investigate the importance of calcium dynamics at the dendritic spine level.
I also work with data from a neighboring region of the hippocampus called the entorhinal cortex. This region contains grid cells. Like place cells, grid cells fire depending on location. However, they fire when one is on any one of many related locations: grid points on a hexagonal grid. These cells do not have an obvious pattern to their layout in the brain. I aim to learn about the connectivity and network structure of these intriguing cells.