I am a neuroscience graduate student in the CNS department at Caltech, presently completing the research for my doctoral thesis in the lab of Pierre Pouget and the team of Marie Vidailhet in the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, affiliated with the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France. I have also previously worked in the labs of Jeffrey Schall at Vanderbilt University and Richard Andersen at Caltech. For my undergraduate education I attended the University of Michigan where I received a B.S.E. in Chemical Engineering as well as a B.S. in Biopsychology with Honors.

Research Projects
My thesis will focus on how electrical voltage and currents propagate within the brain. To study this, we will introduce known electrical signals into animal brains and observe how the recorded signal elsewhere changes relative to the properties of the local neural tissue. In previous work I have also reviewed and experimentally demonstrated the electrical circuit properties of metal microelectrode recordings, and quantified distortions of recorded signals that can occur but may be frequently overlooked by many neurophysiologists. My present work seeks to extend that finding and investigate what distortions might be introduced by the neural tissue itself.

In my earlier work in the Andersen lab, I helped find a novel frame of reference that exists for neural activity of single units in the dorsal pre-motor cortex, which we showed encode all the relative positions between the eye, hand and the target of an impending reach movement. Other work I did in the lab demonstrated a significant, persistent coherence between spikes and local field potentials in the connected brain regions of dorsal premotor cortex and the parietal reach region. We found this coherence is more prevalent when monkeys are freely choosing where to reach, as opposed to merely following instructions as to where to reach.

Research Interests
I am particularly fond of interdisciplinary approaches to studying the brain that can be described as comprising the intersections of neuroscience, cognitive psychology and other engineering fields. General research interests of mine include studying cognition and decision making with a particular emphasis on how these functions can arise from networks of interacting single units. I am also interested in investigating and improving methods in neuroscience research, and neurophysiology research specifically.