Abhilasha - NeuroACT

Abhilasha Joshi, PhD

Abhilasha is a systems neuroscientist and an Assistant Professor (Reader F) at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru, India. She is a Simons Foundation Fellows to Faculty awardee. Her research focuses on studying the interactions between internal cognitive computations and ongoing actions during behavior. Her experimental approach involves combining large-scale electrophysiology, high-resolution videography, behavior, optogenetics, and computational analysis to understand the principles of cognitive-motor flexibility across organismal lifespan.

‍

`Academic Background`

Abhilasha completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali. She then earned her doctorate with Peter Somogyi and David Dupret at the University of Oxford. In her graduate work, she discovered the cellular, synaptic, and physiological properties of a specialized group of long-range projection neurons that coordinate rhythmic oscillatory activity in the hippocampus, a brain region critical for learning and memory.

‍

During her doctoral studies, Abhilasha received a seed grant from the European Institute of Technology (EIT) Health initiative, enabling her to investigate the potential coupling between hippocampal rhythmic oscillations and locomotor stepping rhythm in mice.

‍Postdoctoral Research

For her postdoc, she moved to the University of California San Francisco to work with Loren Frank. Here, she developed an approach to monitor neural and behavioral information at fast timescales during behavior, using which they uncovered that hippocampal spatial representations are linked with locomotor steps during upcoming spatial decisions. She then joined Megan Carey’s group in Lisbon as a Visiting Scientist at the Center for the Unknown at Champalimaud Foundation.

‍Awards and Recognitions ‍
She has been the recipient of various awards and recognitions for her contributions to neuroscience, including the Peter and Patricia Gruber Award at the Society for Neuroscience, the Life Sciences Research Foundation postdoctoral fellowship, and the Healthy Aging Seed Award by the European Institute of Technology.