Team

I completed my undergraduate training at Northeastern University in Behavioral Neuroscience and Computer Science. During that time, I worked in the labs of Dr. Sandeep Robert Datta, Dr. Leon Reijmers, and Dr. Steve Ramirez, where I studied olfactory processing, fear extinction learning, and fear relapse respectively and gained interest in understanding the dynamic nature of memory. I am currently a graduate student in the labs of Dr. Denise Cai and Dr. Kanaka Rajan. I am interested in how the brain constructs dynamic representations of the external world to inform robust but flexible behaviors. I currently use in vivo calcium imaging to study how prior experiences influence future learning, and I conduct in vivo manipulations (e.g. chemo- and opto-genetics) to address how perturbing neural activity influences learning and its underlying neural population dynamics. Alongside these experimental approaches, I use the calcium imaging datasets from our lab to build network models of memory flexibility. These models can produce hypotheses about mechanisms of memory that are testable in vivo. Outside of the lab, I enjoy writing stories with my camera, curating playlists on my Spotify, spending half my weekends baking desserts, and spending the other half eating the desserts. joe.zaki@icahn.mssm.edu