Exploring Brain Networks Involved in Vision and Disease

What issue did you address in your research, and what did your studies find?

My Ph.D. research aimed to advance treatments of neurological disease — and someday even potentially blindness — by improving the understanding of how the brain responds to electrical stimulation and visual information. In one current approach to treating neurological deficits, electrodes implanted within the brain (an approach called intracranial EEG) can be used to deliver electrical stimulation. Ongoing research also looks at how brain signals recorded by these electrodes can decode thought as information that can be used in brain-computer interfaces. To advance both treatment and information-processing technologies, researchers need more detailed information about how populations of neurons in the brain respond to electrical stimulation and sensory inputs.

My studies tackled these questions by studying the response of the human brain to brief electrical pulses and visual stimulation by images of natural scenes. We recorded brain signals from patients who had electrodes implanted for epilepsy monitoring as they underwent an array of stimulation- and visual-based experimental tasks. Traditional methods that quantify brain connectivity look at single components of recorded signals, such as peak amplitude or latency, that are easy to measure. Over the course of my Ph.D., we developed, refined and employed new statistical techniques and computational tools that can more fully characterize brain signals. We found that neuron populations undergo dynamic patterns of excitation and inhibition during stimulation and visual processing. In addition, we identified signal features and patterns related to how information is received and processed. Overall, our findings may contribute to better strategies for targeted brain stimulation treatment and may help predict how electrical stimulation acts on the brain over time.

What opportunities at Mayo did you take advantage of to further your leadership skills and your career path?

I'm a student in the M.D.-Ph.D. program at Mayo Clinic. During graduate school, I had multiple leadership opportunities as a student representative for international students, for my Ph.D. track and for the M.D.-Ph.D. admissions process. The experiences helped me to contextualize the day-to-day challenges that students face and help identify avenues to improve success — for example, smoothing the processes that enable new international students to settle in and start their studies. Being on the admissions committees has also given me valuable insight for the applications and interviews that I will face in residency and beyond.

What's next?

I am still exploring biomedical fields that excite me most and that I will want to pursue wholeheartedly in my career. I love inventing, improving and rigorously testing novel computational techniques that allow me to examine data from different perspectives. My Ph.D. research using intracranial EEG data was the perfect platform to explore methods for studying complex, high-dimensional brain data. For now, I have some time to regroup, follow my heart and think about my next steps as I complete the last two years of my M.D. training at Mayo Clinic.