Research Scientist | Neuroscientist | Data Scientist

Education

PhD in Psychological and Brain Sciences, 2021

Dartmouth College - Hanover, New Hampshire, USA

Thesis: Dynamic coding of motivationally-relevant information in the rodent nucleus accumbens.

Course in Computational Neuroscience, 2020

Neuromatch Academy

MSc in Behavioural Neuroscience, 2013

Wilfrid Laurier University - Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Thesis: The effects of toluene on inhibitory synaptic transmission in the cerebellar cortex.

BSc in Psychology, 2011

Wilfrid Laurier University - Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Minors in Biology and Chemistry

Thesis: Modulation of synaptic transmission at the perforant path-dentate gyrus synapse.

Skills

Experimental - Experimental design, rats, mice, electrophysiology, behaviour, stereotaxic surgery, hardware, animal husbandry, histology

Data Science - Signal processing, wrangling, visualization, regression, PCA, decoding, classification, spike-field, Matlab, Python, GitHub

General - Project management, problem solving, communication, teamwork, mentorship, technical writing

Professional Experience

Postdoctoral Research Scientist

Imperial College London - London, England, UK - September 2021 to Present

I am currently doing postdoctoral work in Juan Gallego’s group at Imperial College London, where I am leading experimental and data science projects of motor control in rodents, and collaborating on projects related to the validation of novel technologies. This work involves:

• Developing Python data preprocessing, visualization and analysis pipelines to understand relationships between populations of neurons and kinematics.

• Leading terminal mouse electrophysiology experiments testing components of a neural interface.

• Establishing mouse electrophysiology procedures, including animal colony management, generating experimental and surgical SOPs, neural data collection, training lab personnel, and building relationships with veterinary and support staff.

• Writing a perspective on isolating the functional contributions of individual brain regions in motor control.

• Mentoring trainees on data analysis projects using machine learning techniques to investigate relationships between neural signals and behaviour.

Doctoral Research Scientist

Dartmouth College - Hanover, New Hampshire, USA - 2015 to 2021

I completed my PhD at Dartmouth College in the lab of Matthijs van der Meer where I sought to integrate classical notions of the nucleus accumbens as a value- and motivation-centric region, with more contemporary evidence suggesting a role in certain aspects of behavioural flexibility. I started this work at the University of Waterloo in 2013 before moving to Darmouth in 2015. Some of my work experience includes:

• Designing, collecting, analyzing, and interpreting 3 primary datasets consisting of extracellular electrophysiological recordings during performance of freely-moving (rats) or head-fixed (mice) behaviours.

• Data collection for various projects involving managing animal colonies, setting up experimental hardware, establishing behavioural tasks, writing Matlab scripts for experiment control, building and implanting electrode arrays, acquiring simultaneous behavioural and electrophysiology data, and performing histology on brain tissue.

• Data processing of various neural datasets in Matlab, including spike sorting, artifact detection in spiking and local field potential data, and filtering local field potentials into frequency bands of interest.

• Cross-validated data analysis of various datasets in Matlab, including relating neural activity to behaviour with z-scores, t-tests, linear regressions, GLMs, LDA, binomial regressions, and demixed PCA; relating oscillatory activity to spiking activity with spike-field metrics such as spike-triggered spectrum and pairwise-phase consistency; and comparing all analyses to shuffled versions of the data.

• Disseminating research findings to the broader scientific community via writing manuscripts for peer-reviewed publications and presenting posters at professional conferences.

• Assisting in the data collection of local field potentials and spike-field analysis of 2 other datasets.

• Mentoring undergraduate students on animal behaviour, and on using Matlab for both experimental control and extracting task-related neural activity.

• Leading laboratory sections for a senior undergraduate systems neuroscience course, focusing on understanding neural circuits via sheep brain dissections, and animal behaviour via various behavioural assays.

• Data collection and student training for a pilot experiment integrating extracellular recordings and fiber photometry, as part of assisting the 2019 mouse striatum module of the Marine Biological Laboratory’s Neural Systems and Behavior course.

Research Scientist

Wilfrid Laurier University - Waterloo, Ontario, Canada - 2009 to 2013

I started my research career with Bruce McKay at Wilfrid Laurier University where I completed my BSc and MSc theses. Here, I investigated the effects of the abused solvent toluene on various aspects of neural function. I was involved in a number of projects, including:

• Designing, collecting, analysing, and interpreting (SPSS, Excel) data for a patch clamp electrophysiology experiment, an extracellular electrophysiology experiment, and a behavioural experiment in rats.

• Assisting tissue processing for an immediate early gene histology experiment.

Publications

See Google Scholar profile.

Awards

Alexander Graham Bell CGS - 2013 to 2016

Medal of Academic Excellence (MSc Thesis) - 2013

Ontario Graduate Scholarship - 2011 to 2013

Last updated July 2023