May 2021 – Present · 5 yrs · Los Angeles, California, United States · On-site

• I am a graduate student researcher under Dr. Sotiris Masmanidis in the Neurobiology Department with 4+ years of laboratory experience. The lab investigates neural correlates in cortical-basal ganglia circuits related to movement and reward timing.
• Led multiple projects investigating neural mechanisms of locomotion in healthy and Parkinson’s disease mouse model
• Performed rodent surgeries and implanted Masmanidis flexible cable silicon probes to record single-unit activity during spontaneous, self-initiated walking in an open field
• Used ML-based pose tracking (e.g., SLEAP, DeepLabCut) to estimate single-limb gait phase in real-time and post hoc
• Conducted optogenetic activation/inactivation of M1 and striatum during locomotion
• Study 1: Developed a novel closed-loop optogenetic stimulation system using mouse gait phase as kinematic feedback, delivering stimulation within milliseconds at specific phases of limb gait
• Study 2: Recorded dorsomedial striatum activity; showed dopamine depletion disrupts gait phase encoding in subtypes of dopamine receptor expressing striatal neurons (direct/indirect pathway neurons)
• Study 3: Applied population decoding methods to contrast cortical and striatal representation of locomotion. Time period for movement preparation was best decoded from dorsomedial striatum activity. By contrast, information about the locomotor rhythm (i.e., the phase of limbs undergoing gait) could be decoded most reliably from primary motor cortex. Identified a complementary signature of locomotion preparation and execution in cortical and striatal circuits (publication under review)

Oct 2018 – Aug 2020 · 1 yr 10 mos · Singapore · On-site

• Conducted research and neuromorphic IoT device development under the direction of Dr. Arindam Basu, BRAIN Systems Lab. The lab pioneered the development of novel defence tech for low power, hardware constrainted areas.
• Addressed detection and classification challenges for neuromorphic vision sensor based traffic surveillance system
• Implemented compute and memory efficient classification and tracking framework to meet the hardware resource budgets for remote areas
• Designed and tested hardware blocks for the surveillance system using low-power SELMAv2 classifier chips as the baseline

May 2017 – Jul 2017 · 2 mos · East Lansing, USA · On-site

• Conducted research under the direction of Dr. Arjun Krishnan in the Department of Computational Math, Science & Engineering. The lab develops computational approaches for genomic datasets to unravel meaningful insights related to health and disease.
• Improved the computational reconstitution of microarray expression of unmeasured genes by over 3% for genome expression datasets like GPL570 and GPL96 using Autoencoder based networks