I study the neural mechanisms underlying episodic-like memory as a postdoctoral fellow in the Aronov lab. My research utilizes the natural caching behaviors of black-capped chickadees, who in the wild manage thousands of individually cached food items using hippocampal-dependent memories. I have also developed methods for silicon probe recording and 3D postural reconstruction during unconstrained, laboratory-based caching behavior, allowing the first characterization of hippocampal representations underlying cache memory. This research identified ‘barcodes’ in hippocampal activity, which may subserve memory as a unique identifier for individual, memorable episodes.

I received my PhD from Harvard in the Harvey lab, where I developed an all-optical method (‘influence mapping’) permitting functional and structural characterization of a neural population. I applied this method to primary visual cortex, discovering a combination of recurrent suppressive and excitatory motifs contributing to visual stimulus identification. I also designed a flexible navigation-based decision making task in virtual reality, and characterized similarities and differences in task encoding across posterior cortical areas.

You can find a list of my publications with selected highlights here, or view my google scholar profile