Assistant Professor
Department of Neuroscience
Université de Montréal

Google Scholar

I am a neuroscientist and engineer
studying the neural control of behavior
and developing neuroprosthetics.

Long-term stability of cortical population dynamics underlying consistent behavior
Nature Neuroscience (2020)
We showed that latent dynamics in the neural manifold across three cortical areas are stable throughout years of consistent behavior, and posit that these dynamics are fundamental building blocks of learned behavior.

A neural population mechanism for rapid learning
Neuron (2018)
I proposed a neural mechanism to rapidly develop new motor output by leveraging the intrinsically higher dimensionality of cortical regions compared to the behavioral output.

Neural manifolds for the control of movement
Neuron (2017)
We formalized the "neural manifold" framework as an approach to better understand how populations of neurons in the brain generate behavior.

Motor cortical dynamics are shaped by multiple distinct subspaces during naturalistic behavior
bioRxiv (2020)
I show a unique view into motor cortical dynamics that accounts for sensory feedback necessary to correct behavioral errors.

Inferring brain-wide interactions using data-constrained recurrent neural network models
bioRxiv (2020)
We present a novel approach to untangling brain-wide interactions underlying large-scale multi-region neural recordings. (code available at: https://github.com/rajanlab/CURBD)

Education

2017    PhD    Northwestern University     Biomedical Engineering
2015    MSc    Northwestern University     Biomedical Engineering
2010    BSc    University of Pittsburgh      Bioengineering

Experience

2022 - present | Assistant Professor | Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada
2022 - present | Associate Member | Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute (Mila), Montréal, Canada


2020 - 2022 | Postdoctoral Fellow | Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York
Advised by Kanaka Rajan (in collaboration with Karl Deisseroth)
Constructing large-scale, data-driven recurrent neural network (RNN) models of whole-brain larval zebrafish recordings to model interactions between multiple brain regions.

2017 - 2020 | Postdoctoral Fellow | University of Geneva, Switzerland
Co-advised by Gregoire Courtine, Marco Capogrosso, and Tomislav Milekovic
Studied sensorimotor integration during reach and grasp using multi-area recordings of sensorimotor cortex, the evolution of neural dynamics throughout functional recovery from cervical spinal cord injury, and developed brain-spine interfaces to restore reaching and grasping after cervical spinal cord injury and alleviate gait deficits in a primate model of Parkinson’s disease.

2011 - 2017 | Doctoral Student | Northwestern University, Chicago
Advised by Lee Miller
Applied the “neural manifold” framework to understand neural population dynamics in behavior and developed population-level analyses to characterize interactions between cortical areas.

2010 - 2011 | Whitaker International Scholar | Blue Brain Project, EPFL, Switzerland
Advised by Henry Markram
Studied models of synaptic plasticity within a large-scale cortical simulation and spiking neural networks.

2008 - 2010 | Undergraduate Research Fellow | University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh
Advised by Doug Weber
Developed reservoir computing models to improve limb state decoding from cat Ia afferent recordings