I received a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. My postdoctoral training was in the department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School with Dr. John Maunsell. I joined the Center for Neuroscience in June 2011.
To understand brain function, electrical activity can be recorded using a variety of techniques, such as using microelectrodes in monkeys that provide information at a very local scale (one or a few neurons), to diffuse population measures such as electroencephalography (EEG) in humans that provide information at a much larger scale (millions of neurons). At such scales, brain signals often show oscillations at different frequencies, whose magnitude or frequency may depend on the cognitive state. The long-term goal of the lab is to link the neural recordings obtained from these vastly different scales, such that brain function can be understood at both circuit and network level. In particular, we focus on a particular brain rhythm called gamma (30-80 Hz), which is modulated by high-level cognitive tasks such as selective attention and meditation. Our cross-species, cross-scale research setup is used to understand the neural mechanisms underlying high-level cognition and has direct applications in brain-computer interfacing and in clinical diagnosis of mental disorders.
