Scientific Research
I am currently a graduate student at the Program in Neuroscience at Boston Unversity. I am involved in research at the Olfactory Systems Lab at Boston University under the supervision of Dr. Matt Wachowiak. Prior to this position, I spent one year working in the Active Perception Laboratory at Boston University.
My areas of focus include computer vision, humanoid robotics, active vision, image segmentation, figure-ground separation, and computational biological modeling.
For more information, please see my CV
Previous Research
UC Berkeley
While at UC Berkeley, I worked for two years in Prof. Richard Ivry’s Cognition and Action laboratory. One project with which I was involved investigated goal-oriented reaching movements. We investigated how people adjust their movements to ensure that their hand comes to stop at a target location. Research has shown the existence of a fast feedback loop that guides the hand to a target location during a goal-directed reaching task. We created a virtual reality interactive setup that allowed subjects to move to visually cued locations by making reaching movements. One of the key findings of this project was that the movement interactions favored a mirror asymmetric coordinate system. Previously, the majority of bimanual coordination literature displays the motor system preference for mirror symmetric movements. The findings of this project were published in the European Journal of Neuroscience (March 2004). I was also involved in a second research project in the Ivry lab that investigated the planning and selection of movements. We used Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) in an effort to bias choice in the motor selection of a reaching task.
During the last year and half of college, I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Eliot Hazeltine in the Human Performance Laboratory at NASA-AMES. I was involved with an fMRI project that sought to identify neural structures activated when response expectancies are violated. The results of this study were presented at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in 2003.
Columbia University Medical Center
From September 2004 to April 2006, I worked in the electrophysiology lab of Dr.Daniel Salzman at Columbia University. I was actively engaged in a study of emotional learning using a primate model. We investigated how a subcortical structure, the amygdala, is involved in the consolidation of associations between novel visual images and positive and aversive responses. During the experiment, we recorded from single neurons in the amygdala, and as the monkeys learned which images were positively valued and which were negatively valued, the firing of amygdala neurons dynamically and flexibly reflected the learned emotional value of the conditioned images.
From April 2006 to July 2007 I worked at the Clinical Neuroscience lab of Dr. Yaakov Stern at the Taub Institute for Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain at Columbia University. One of the projects with which I was involved investigated the difference between younger and older adult in working and recognition memory tasks. Older adults often display age-related deficits in memory function. They may use different brain networks to compensate for the effects of normal aging. In this project, older and younger subjects perform a working memory retrieval task while undergoing fMRI. We discovered some brain areas that are recruited in this compensation paradigm. The results of this study were published in the Journal of Psychology and Aging in 2008.