Shreya Saxena
Yale University, CT·Neuroscience
People and animals solve the same mental task in different ways, and one visible sign of that is spontaneous movement. A person learning a task might tap a foot or shift their gaze; a mouse might twitch its whiskers or face in its own idiosyncratic pattern.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
Computer Science
- Topics
spontaneous movements
decision-making
neural dynamics
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Learn subject-independent dynamical models of cortical activity in mice performing a decision-making task, while separately quantifying each animal's subject-specific dynamics.
- Model spontaneous, uninstructed movements such as whisker and facial motion explicitly, to separate movement-related neural dynamics from those driven by the cognitive task.
- Apply transfer learning, using a trained across-subject model as the starting point for a new animal and refining it with that animal's data, to avoid extensive per-subject training.
- Use the fitted models for model-based control strategies that design closed-loop neurostimulation, in which stimulation responds to ongoing cortical activity.
More about the research
Because both movement and the task itself change activity across the cortex, it becomes very hard to tell which brain signals reflect the decision and which reflect the fidgeting. Sorting this out, while accounting for how much subjects differ from one another, is a necessary step toward understanding the neural basis of cognition.
Why it matters
Understanding what spontaneous, uninstructed movements do during thinking and learning matters for interpreting brain recordings and for conditions where movement and attention interact, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Models that transfer across individuals could reduce the per-subject tuning that closed-loop neurostimulation now requires, which may help in assessing and developing therapies for neurobehavioral disorders.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Tirin Moore
Stanford University, CA·Neuroscience
Identify which lateral prefrontal neuron subpopulations control attention by recording with Neuropixels probes in the frontal eye field and area 46 of monkeys and using real-time decoders to trigger stimulus perturbations.
Joseph O'Neill
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine whether trigeminal nerve stimulation, a noninvasive facial nerve stimulation therapy cleared for ADHD, is feasible for children with prenatal alcohol exposure, measuring compliance, side effects and early signs of symptom relief in a pilot phase.
Eva Dyer
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Computer Science·Early-career
Develop self-supervised and contrastive learning methods that learn representations of neural population activity that stay stable despite irrelevant variation.
The school
Yale University: 73 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.
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