After six months of work on a computational project about hippocampal population dynamics, Athena decided to get the most out of the technical expertise of the Diamond lab.
Mathew Diamond, at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste. Athena used this model to explain phenomena such as pattern completion, adaptation aftereffect and priming, in the context of ambiguous perception, in human behavior and monkey electrophysiology.Īfter her PhD, Athena joined the Tactile Perception and Learning Lab, led by Prof. firing rates) of populations of neurons can be more or less stable, they will eventually evolve to converge on a stable configuration, called an ‘attractor state’. According to this model, while different configurations (i.e. Treves’ lab for a PhD in Computational Neuroscience, where she investigated how memory and perception can be explained by attractor dynamics. Treves was applying reductionist lenses to describe the behavior of complex systems such as neuronal networks. Alessandro Treves at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste (Italy), she became fascinated by his elegant approach to neuroscience.
#Eeg en vivo series
To further explore the field first-hand, Athena arranged a series of summer research internships across Europe. From that moment on, Athena’s passion for neuroscience has been unstoppable. While working on electroencephalography (EEG) signal processing, she built the first brain-computer interface (BCI) in Iran, using her brother as a subject and training him to control a cursor on a monitor. Growing up surrounded by a plethora of political and religious ideas, she had always wondered - ‘How can people be so complicated?’ One day, an article she read about artificial neural networks sparked a thought - perhaps she could build a brain herself? This was an ambitious goal, but during her undergraduate degree in biomedical and control engineering at the Tehran Polytechnic, Athena got quite close to it. Although she always had very good grades in math and physics, Athena was more interested in understanding human behavior. At that time, there was no dedicated program to study the brain in Iranian universities. Athena Akrami had never heard of neuroscience. These results indicate that the abnormal EEG activities in IAE patients could be well reproduced in anesthetized IAV infected rats under hyperthermia, hence this animal model will be useful for further understandings the mechanism of neuronal complications in IAE patient during high-grade fever.As a high school student, Dr. When the infected rats were heat-stressed by elevating the rat body core temperature to 39-41 o, these abnormal EEG activities were enhanced, and the oscillation pattern shifted in most of rats from slow bursting waves (<1 Hz) to theta oscillation (3-6 Hz). Abnormal EEG activities were observed in all infected rats under anesthesia, including high voltage EEG burst amplitude and increased EEG spikes in the early phase (8 h-day 2) of infection, and these increases at the early phase were in parallel with a significant increase level of interleukin-6 (IL-6) in the serum. To understand the neuronal properties in the CNS leading to these neurological complications in IAE patients, we recorded EEG signals from the hippocampus and cortex of rats infected with influenza A/WSN/33 H1N1 virus (IAV) strain. At the early phase of the disease, the cytokines levels increase in severe cases. The major neurological complications during high-grade fever include convulsive seizures, loss of consciousness, neuropsychiatric behavior (hallucination, meaningless speech, disorientation, laughing alone) high voltage amplitude slow waves and the occurrence of theta oscillation are depicted on the electroencephalogram (EEG) in the IAE patients. Influenza-associated encephalopathy (IAE) is characterized by severe neurological complications during high-grade fever with high morbidity and mortality in children.