My research interests are in understanding the principles of neural coding, plasticity and information processing at the cellular and network level in neuronal circuits of the brain. I am especially interested in neural representation of sensory information and the neural basis of behavior and learning. I want to understand the basis of sensory perception - the process underlying the transformation from sensory input to perception to goal-directed behavior, and how the brain learns and stores memories.

Starting early 2009. I will be investigating the neural mechanisms underlying learning and memory as a post-doctoral research fellow at UCSF.

For my graduate work (and my current post-doctoral work), I am studying the rat vibrissa system in Dan Feldman's lab. The vibrissa (or whisker/barrel) system is an excellent system for studying the questions I am interested in. Whiskers are ethologically very important for rats - being nocturnal animals, they are an essential part of a rats sensory arsenal and are used for navigation, identifying objects and directing behavior. The cortical area representing the whiskers (barrel cortex) constitutes about 1/3-1/2 of their somatosensory cortex (S1) and sensory information coming from a single whisker is projected to a single cortical column or 'barrel', making this a very attractive anatomical and electrophysiological system for studying sensory representation.

My thesis focus is studying neural responses and encoding of stimuli during active sensation in the whisker system using various experimental (behavioral training, acute and chronic awake-behaving electrophysiological recordings) and computational techniques (quantitative analysis of physiology data and modeling). Rats actively move their vibrissae against stimulti to build a percept, and they can do complicated behavioral tasks like discrimintaing roughness of textures with their whiskers. Using chronic tetrode recordings in awake-behaving animals, I am investigating the features of whisker kinetics that drive spiking responses in S1 neurons when rats are actively whisking against stimuli. Based on these neural responses, I am studying how they encode stimulus information and discriminate between different stimuli.

In a previous project in Dans lab, in collaboration with Massimo Scanziani, I studied the mechanisms underlying precise spike timing in S1 neurons in response to whisker deflection, in the thalamocortical pathway of the barrel system. Using extracellular recordings in the VPM thalamus and S1 cortex, I studied how spike jitter varies during rapid trains of stimuli. Using invitro recordings, Massimo showed that thalamocortical feed-forward inhibition controls the temporal window of integration of thalamic inputs to S1 barrel cortex and thus serves to increase the temporal resolution of tactile inputs.

Before graduate school, I spent a year in Shona Chattarji's lab in NCBS. The lab investigates stress and depression mechanisms and their effects on hippocampal and amygdalar function, using the rat as a model organism. Using anatomical, physiological and molecular methods, I looked at changes in dendritic structure, physiology and molecular expression in the hippocampus and amygdala as a substrate for the observed behavioral changes of memory impairments and increased anxiety.

Previously, I have worked on various other projects involving Drosophila genetics, auditory attention, neural computational modelling, bioinformatics, etc.