SamanAbbaspoor

I am a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital. My long-term research goal is to discover the neural principles that govern brain dynamics across species and use this knowledge to identify mechanisms that break down in brain disorders.

As an undergraduate, I trained with Dr. Ali Asadollahi, where I investigated the neural mechanisms of target selection and spatial attention in marmosets. This experience provided my first opportunity to design cognitive tasks, collect behavioral data, and record brain signals in midbrain areas.

For my doctoral training with Dr. Kari Hoffman, I investigated the neural organization of recent and remote memories in freely moving macaques during task performance and sleep. We demonstrated, for the first time in nonhuman primates, how hippocampal–cortical networks reorganize to support new learning while preserving established memories. We also showed that hippocampal neural patterns in macaques are drastically different than rodents across different behavioral states. To achieve this, we developed a novel 3D behavioral enclosure with precise task control and wireless neural recordings.

As a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Jordan Farrell, I am extending these approaches to characterize hippocampal–cortical computations in both health and disease. My work combines in vivo and ex vivo two-photon calcium imaging and large-scale electrophysiology in mice and humans to uncover how different brain disorders including Alzheimer’s disease, Fragile X Syndrome, and Bipolar Disorder corrupt the neural patterns that underlie learning and memory.