I joined the Monosov Lab for my postdoc role in January 2023 to investigate the cortical and subcortical systems that control exploration and learning. Whilst exploring our environment, we need to learn what aspects of our behaviour lead to success, selecting them over other options that may be detrimental to performance. However, our environment is rarely stable and actions that may be useful in one context may not be useful in another. As such, in new or unfamiliar environments, we have a greater uncertainty as to which choices will lead to positive or negative outcomes. Accordingly, our behaviour needs to be flexible so that we can explore and interact with these new environments, building up a representation of its structure, learning the relationship between stimuli, actions, and outcomes.

🎓 I completed my PhD in December 2022 as part of the Schall Lab at Vanderbilt University. In my PhD, I looked at the association between medial frontal cortex function and cognitive control across multiple scales: from behaviour, to EEG on top of the head, to local field potentials within the brain, to activity at the single-neuron level. Cognitive control allows us to flexibly allocate our cognitive resources (such as attentional, perception, and motor systems) to achieve our goals. This ability is important when we need to stop ourselves from doing something that is automatic, but wrong - this is known as response inhibition.

💻 Languages: MATLAB, Python, R