I am a research scientist at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT in Michale Fee’s laboratory. My long-term research goal is to uncover the neuronal circuit mechanisms behind sensory-motor behaviors that lead to cognition. Addressing such a challenging topic requires building good hypotheses, constructing efficient models to formulate these hypotheses, and implementation of advanced technologies required for measurements and manipulations of neural circuits in behaving animals. In my work, I try to combine three lines of inquiry: First, study the behavior in the most ethologically relevant way possible in the laboratory combined with its cellular, circuit and computational aspects. Second, building methods and technologies that enable us to record and manipulate the brain during behavior, and tools for the analysis of complex behavior. Third, developing computational models with testable predictions to provide engineering level descriptions of how the brain learns and generates complex behaviors.
At MIT, my research is about understanding how the brain generates and learns complex sequential behaviors. Unlike innate behaviors such as breathing and swallowing, performing complex tasks such as speaking or thinking requires our brain to go through a learned sequence of states. Our brains must construct a new motor pattern (or ‘program’) for each new behavior we need to learn. Using a combination of techniques—behavior, imaging, electrophysiology and mathematical modeling, my research target is to develop mechanistic description of the neuronal circuits that produce these behaviors. In particular, I am interested in how the thalamus, a critical component of the brainstem-thalamocortical loops controlling many motor behaviors, maintains and controls the patterns of sequential activity in the cortex.
My PhD work at Mathew Diamond’s lab focused on how the signals arriving through multiple senses are integrated to form a unified percept. I developed a novel visual-tactile decision making task for rats and linked theory and experiment by assessing the multisensory integration process with behavioral measures, and then probed neuronal processing in behaving animals. I examined the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) and uncovered the role of PPC in the supramodal processing of shape. My work helped elucidate mechanisms by which knowledge about an object is triggered, independently of the sensory channel engaged (Nikbakht et al., 2018; Neuron). While developing the behavioral task, I challenged a long-standing dogma in the field that rodents are functionally blind when their surroundings are illuminated with light of longer wavelengths, which humans perceive as red. This finding has important implications for the design of experiments and housing of rodents (Nikbakht and Diamond, 2021; eLife).