I am a neuroscience graduate student in the CNS department at Caltech, presently completing the research for my doctoral thesis in the lab of Jeffrey Schall in the Psychology Department at Vanderbilt University. I have also worked in the lab of Richard Andersen previously 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 improving our understanding of how competing saccade plans are represented in the brain and how they develop during the reaction time period before a subject makes an eye movement. To study this, we use multiple electrode recordings in the Frontal Eye Fields in a search-step paradigm in which a subject has to respond to an unexpected step in the target position of an eye movement just before an eye movement is made. By varying the time delay between the appearance and unexpected step of the target, we can systematically affect the probability of whether or not a subject will correctly compensate for the target step with their impending eye movement. We do this while simultaneously observing the activity of neurons involved in responding to both the initial and final target locations. I am also studying the effects of repeated stimuli and eye movements on consecutive trials, and characterizing the adverse effects that unavoidable behavioral nonstationarities and low frequency fluctuations have on these and other analyses within this and other paradigms.

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. 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 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. More specifically, I believe understanding how stimulus-response mappings are carried out in the human and non-human primate brain will be important towards that broader research goal. Finally, I am interested in improving our understanding of how electrical voltage and currents propagate within the brain.