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.

Profile - Dr. V Srinivasa Chakravarthy

 Dr. Arjun Ramakrishnan is an assistant professor in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering and the Mehta Family Centre for Engineering in Medicine at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He is a DBT-Wellcome Trust India Alliance Intermediate Fellow (2021-26). He co-founded Cogwear in 2018, a neurotechnology startup that makes use of custom-made, flexible, dry nanowire-based sensors to gather EEG signals; these signals are used to train machine learning algorithms to measure and trend changes in anxiety. He recently co-founded Eywa Neuro in 2021, a startup that develops thin film polymer based probes for surface and deep brain recording and stimulation of brain activity. His primary research interest lies in understanding the neural mechanisms underlying reward-guided decision making in health and in disease, with a focus on mood disorders in human and nonhuman primate models. Arjun holds a PhD in Neuroscience from the National Brain Research Centre and a BE in Telecommunications from BMS College of Engineering. He trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Profile - Dr. Arjun Ramakrishnan

Dr. Ramkrishna Pasumarthy is currently working as a Professor at the Control and Optimisation group , Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras. He obtained his PhD in systems and control from University of Twente, The Netherlands and held post doc positions at University of Melbourne and UCLA. His research interests lie in the area of Network Sytems optimization and control, Control of BrainNetworks, Data Driven methods in systems and control, Connected and autonomous vehicles. He is also associated with the Robert Bosch Center for Data Sciences and Artificial Intelligence at IIT Madras. He is also a coordinator for NPTEL.

Profile - Dr. Ramkrishna Pasumarthy

Trained first as an engineer and then as a neuroscientist, Dr. Fabien Wagner conduct research at the intersection between Neuroscience and Neuroengineering. He is interested in understanding how the dynamics of neuronal networks become altered in neurological disorders or after injury, and how to restore their natural behaviour using neuromodulation approaches. During his Ph.D. at Brown University, he developed new tools to record and stimulate the brain simultaneously and investigated the cortical dynamics that underlie the transition to epileptic seizures in rodent models and epileptic patients. During my postdoctoral work at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), he  pioneered neuroprosthetic technologies to restore locomotion in non-human primates (Nature 2016; Nature Protocols 2018). He then led a large team of scientists, engineers and clinicians to translate these technologies into patients with spinal cord injury in the context of a first-in-human clinical trial (Nature, 2018). As a team leader within the Institute of Neurodegenerative Diseases at the Bordeaux Neurocampus, I am now interested in expanding the use of neuroprosthetic systems beyond their current applications in motor disorders, towards neurocognitive disorders such as memory impairments and dementia.

Profile - Dr. Fabien Wagner

Dr. Sharba Bandyopadhyay did his BTech (1999) in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering, IIT Kharagpur, India. He then did his MSE (2001) and PhD (2007) in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA, respectively from the School of Engineering and School of Medicine. Sharba’s Master’s Thesis was on speech coding in the auditory nerve and his doctoral work was on spectral and temporal coding properties of neurons in the cochlear nucleus. Following his PhD he joined the Institute of Systems Research and Department of Biology at the University of Maryland (UMD), College

Park, USA as a postdoctoral fellow (2007-2009) and worked on the sound encoding properties of the auditory cortex and rapid and developmental plasticity in the auditory cortex. He later continued at UMD as Research Track faculty (2009-2012). At UMD Sharba worked on answering questions about auditory encoding and plasticity using in-vivo and in vitro 2-photon Ca imaging, 2-photon single neuron stimulation and electrophysiology. With a Wellcome Trust DBT Fellowship, Sharba moved to India to start his own lab in 2012. After short stay at NBRC India (2012-2014), he moved to IIT Kharagpur and has been there since 2014. His research interests include developmental plasticity at the neuronal micro-circuit level and neurodevelopmental disorders. So far, 8 students have completed their doctoral degree work under Sharba's supervision. Other than research, Sharba also teaches Neuroscience to Engineering students and other Electrical Engineering and Electrical Communication courses.

Profile - Dr. Sharba Bandyopadhyay 

Dr. Dipanjan Roy leads a Brain Connectivity, Dynamics, and Cognition lab at NBRC and IIT Jodhpur CBSA School of AI & Data Science. His group is working on various research aspects related to Neuroimaging using fMRI, EEG, MEG, and DTI techniques to investigate whole Brain Connectivity, Neural Population Dynamics to understand neural correlates of goal-directed behavior. Additionally, his group investigates factors governing aging-associated alterations in large-scale brain connectivity & dynamical patterns. The specific areas in which his lab is known for its contributions include the development of new computational models and methods for understanding human learning, perceptual processing, Cognitive control and working memory, Healthy Aging, Emotion processing, and Multisensory Speech processing. His group is also involved in the structural and functional connectomes-based approach to determine Aging effects on cognition, neurodegenerative and developmental disorders such as Autism, and the emerging field of computational neuropsychiatry. In particular, the group is looking at the relationship between structural perturbations and lesions in patients and investigating mechanisms of reorganization of functional connectivity using Computational Modelling and non-invasive probes. He has made several key contributions to our understanding of the dynamical processing entailed in the complex age-associated changes in the brain. His group has specifically pinpointed the computational role of time delay, time-scale separation, structure-function relationship, and plasticity that unfolds in a dynamical landscape in the brain. He has more than 50 publications in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, and book chapters, including Neuroimage, Nature Communications, e-Neuro, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Cerebral Cortex, Network Neuroscience, Journal of Neuroscience, European Journal of Neuroscience, Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience and serving in the capacity of an editorial board member in Frontiers in Psychology, Computational Neuroscience and Neurology. Notable awards include the DBT Ramalingaswami Fellowship, the SERB core research award, and the Organization of Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) merit Award. 

Profile - Dr. Dipanjan Roy 

Dr. S. Ramanathan is the inaugural holder of the Rodkin-Weintraub Chair in Engineering at Rutgers University since Fall 2022. Previously he has held faculty positions at Purdue University and Harvard University. Their group conducts research in oxide semiconductors for neuromorphic computing; opto-electronics and AI and extensively collaborate with diverse research groups across engineering and natural sciences. 

 Profile - Dr. Shriram Ramanathan

Dr. Aasef Shaikh is a neurologist and neuroscientist from Daroff-Dell’Osso Ocular Motility Laboratory at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center. His research focuses on the application of control systems engineering to approach complex disorders of the vestibular system, eye movements, head movements, gait and balance. The overarching goal is to discover novel network connections and leverage their influence to modulate the motor circuits artificially for the treatment of intractable neurological conditions. Dr. Shaikh was the recipient of the prestigious American Academy of Neurology Alliance Founders Award and The American Neurological Association Grass Foundation Award in Neuroscience. Dr. Shaikh is Director of the newly designated National VA Parkinson’s Disease Consortium Center due to his tremendous clinical research and clinical efforts related to Parkinson’s Disease and movement disorders 

Profile - Dr. Aasef Shaikh

Dr.  Rukmini Kumar co-founded  Vantage Research in 2013 and has since served as its Chief Scientist. Rukmini leads multi-disciplinary teams in developing mechanistic models of Pharmacokinetics & Pharmacodynamics to simulate novel drugs and trial designs to enable better decision making. She has worked with many of the major pharmaceutical companies, including Eli Lilly, Merck, Genentech, Moderna, Pfizer as well as a number of biotechs & the Gates Foundation. She has worked in several disease areas such as diabetes, oncology, auto-immune diseases, liver toxicity and sepsis. She completed her Bachelors and Masters in Physics (University of Madras and IIT, Madras), and  Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Pittsburgh (Thesis Title: Dynamics of Acute Inflammation) 

Profile - Dr. Rukmini Kumar

Dr. Guillaume Attuel obtained his PhD in physics at the École Polytechnique, working out radical shortcomings of magnetic fusion because of turbulence in plasmas. He then received a grant to initiate a work on arrhythmias at CND McGill, exploiting the techniques and concepts coming from turbulence, before moving to ESPCI in Paris and the Liryc institute in Bordeaux in close collaboration with cardiologists. He was a starting research fellow for a few more years at Inria to continue with this effort, at Geostat team, where ideas from physics are hybridized with ideas from applied mathematics. He is now the CEO and scientific director of Bits2Beat.

Profile - Dr. Guillaume Attuel