The Speakers

Prof. V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy obtained his BTech from IIT Madras, MS /PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. He received postdoctoral training in the neuroscience department at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston. The Computational Neuroscience Lab (CNS Lab) that he heads works on developing models of the basal ganglia, spatial navigation, stroke rehabilitation, and neurovascular coupling. He is the author of two books in neuroscience. He is the inventor of a novel script called Bharati, a unified script for Indian languages.

Prof. Christopher Moore is a Professor of Neuroscience at Brown University, Rhode Island and the Associate Director of the Robert J. and Nancy D. Carney Institute for Brain Science. He obtained his PhD from MIT and went to do Post doctoral training at Harvard Medical School. Currently his lab focuses on studying the mechanisms underlying brain dynamics and how they influence behaviour with a heavy focus on information processing by non-neuronal systems in the brain.

Lab Website - The Moore Lab

Dr. Supratim Ray obtained his PhD from Johns Hopkins University and is currently an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. The long term goal of his lab at IISc is to link the neural recordings obtained from vastly different scales, such that brain function can be understood at both circuit and network level. In particular, they focus on a particular brain rhythm called gamma (30-80 Hz), which is modulated by high-level cognitive tasks such as selective attention.

Lab Website - NeurOscillations Lab

Dr. Poonam Thakur is as an Assistant Professor currently working at IISER, Thiruvananthapuram. She obtained her PhD from Punjab University, Chandigarh and went on to do her postdoctoral research from Anders Bjorklund's lab at Lund University, Sweden and Jochen Roeper's lab at Goethe University, Germany. She is a receipent of Early Career Fellowship from Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance. Her lab focuses on the role of alpha-synuclein aggregates in driving Parkinson's Disease (PD) process. In addition, they also try to find the reason behind the high susceptibility of substantia nigra neurons to degenerate during PD.

Lab Website - Thakur Lab

Dr. Santhosh Sethuramanujam obtained his PhD from the State University of Buffalo, New York and is currently an Assistant Professor at IIT Madras. His research interests lie in Visual information encoded by neuronal circuits, Neuronal communication, Information processing in dendrites, Role of neuropeptides in facilitating neuronal function, Mechanisms underlying neuronal degeneration, Development of strategies for vision restoration.

Lab Website - Dr. Santhosh

Prof. John Beggs is currently a professor of physics at Indiana University, Bloomington, where his lab uses ideas from statistical physics to describe information processing in networks of neurons. Dr.Beggs obtained his PhD from Yale University and did his postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health.

Lab Website - The Beggs Lab

Dr. Nisha N Kannan is as an Assistant Professor currently working at IISER, Thiruvananthapuram. She obtained her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore, and did her postdoctoral research at Okayama University, Japan. Her lab is broadly focused towards understanding the genetic basis and neural circuits underlying circadian clock mediated metabolism, sleep, and memory. To this end, they use the model organism fruit fly Drosophila that offers convenient tools for conducting comprehensive genetic, molecular and behavioral studies.

Lab Website - Chronobiology Laboratory

Dr. P.N. Sylaja is currently a Professor of Neurology at SCTIMST, Thiruvananthapuram. Her areas of interest lie in Stroke and Epilepsy. She is an active member of the Indian Stroke Association, Indian Epilepsy Association and several others.

Profile - Dr. Sylaja

Dr. Darrell Haufler is a scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. He obtained his PhD from Rutgers University as an experimentalist where he worked with neural recordings from rodents and humans. He is currently constructing large scale models of cortical networks based on datasets collected at the Allen Institute.

Profile - Dr. Darrell

Dr. Anitha Pasupathy obtained her PhD from Johns Hopkins University and went on to do her postdoctoral research at MIT. She is currently working as Associate Professor at University of Washington, Seattle. Her lab investigates the neural basis of visual shape representation and recognition. The lab's main area of focus is area V4, an intermediate stage in the shape processing pathway in primates.

Lab Website - Shape Lab

Dr. Ramshekhar Menon is currently a Professor of Neurology at SCTIMST, Thiruvananthapuram. His primary areas of interest lie in Pediatric Epilepsy, Cognitive Neurology, Autoimmune Diseases, genetics of epilepsy, epilepsy surgery, EEG-video EEG.

Profile - Dr. Ramshekhar

Dr. Sunil Kumar Kopparapu obtained his doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering from the IIT, Bombay. After PhD, he was with the Automation Group, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Brisbane, Australia working on practical image processing and 3D vision problems, mainly for the benefit of the Australian mining industry. In his current role as Principal Scientist with the TCS Research, he is actively working in the areas of speech signal processing with a focus on building usable systems for mass use in Indian conditions.

Website - Dr. Sunil

Dr. Krishna Sridhar is the Founder and CTO of CONXAI Technologies located at Munich, Germany. Before CONXAI, he headed the AI R&D for Autonomous Driving at Continental Germany, where he worked for 8 years. His Corporate experience was preceded by an academic experience for 9 years with a PhD and Postdoctoral Research in Explainable AI.

Website - CONXAI

Dr. Aniruddha Sinha is a IEEE Senior Member and has more than 24 years of experience in the area of Signal Processing, Embedded Systems and Healthcare. He has done PhD from Jadavpur University in the area of Cognitive analysis using physiological sensors and M.Tech in Electrical & Electronics Communication Engineering from IIT-Kharagpur. At present he is working as a Principal Scientist in TCS Research and is working in the area of biophysical computational modeling of Heart and Basal Ganglia. He has published several papers in peer reviewed International IEEE and ACM conferences and journals and has more than 40 granted patents in USA, Europe and India.

Profile - Dr. Aniruddha