BA, Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, 1994
PhD, Neuroscience, George Washington University, 2001
Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for BioDynamics, Boston University, 2001-2006
Neural stimulation with electrical pulses is used to treat many diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease with deep brain stimulation, epilepsy with cortical stimulation, and chronic pain with spinal cord stimulation. While this therapy is highly effective for some patients, there are many that receive limited benefit.
There is also interest in using electrical stimulation for a wide range of other diseases and conditions, such as obsessive compulsive disorder, depression, dystonia, and paraplegia. Tuning the electrical stimulation parameters, such as stimulation amplitude, frequency, and pulse width, is patient-specific and can be very time consuming for a clinician.
The NeuralNetoff lab is developing novel approaches for optimizing electrical stimulation to maximize outcomes for each patient. Our lab tests therapies and optimization algorithms in computational models and animal models. We also have a large translational component, testing these algorithms in humans with our clinical collaborators.
Synchronization in Hybrid Neuronal Networks of the Hippocampal Formation J Neurophysiol (2005).
Epilepsy in Small-World Networks J. Neuroscience (2004).
Decreased Neuronal Synchronization during Experimental Seizures J. Neurosci (2002).