▌Department Seminar
Title : Computational modeling of brain functional dynamics
Date/Time : 2024/09/06 03:30
Venue : MSB 241
Speaker: Dr. Parul Verma
Biography of the Speaker :
Parul Verma is an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India. Previously, she was a postdoc at the University of California San Francisco, Department of Radiology. She obtained her Ph.D. at Purdue University. Before that, she obtained her B.Tech in Chemical Engineering from IIT Bombay. Parul’s doctoral work has been recognized by a faculty lectureship award from Purdue Chemical Engineering, and her postdoctoral work has been awarded a fellowship by the Alzheimer’s association. Her research interests are broadly on mathematical modeling of the whole brain to understand the underlying biophysical mechanisms of the brain in health and disease.
Affiliation of the Speaker :
Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Abstract :
Understanding neuronal dynamics, and how they are affected in neurological disorders, is one of the key problems in neuroscience
. This talk will describe advances in theoretical and biophysically grounded tools to understand neuronal mechanisms, with a focus on the functional activity of the entire brain. Specifically, it will demonstrate a graph-based mathematical model that captures the spectral and spatial features of the brain’s functional activity. This modeling approach revealed biophysical alterations in Alzheimer’s disease, different stages of sleep, and spontaneous fluctuations in electrophysiological functional activity. Together, these results aim to highlight the importance of such modeling techniques in identifying the underlying biophysical mechanisms of neuronal dynamics, which can be intractable to infer using neuroimaging data alone.