Members & Collaborators

UCLA Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory (CNL)

Alumni

CNL

Itzhak Fried, M.D., Ph.D.
CNL Director
UCLA Division of Neurosurgery
BOX 957039, 18-225 NPI
740 Westwood Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095-7039
(310) 825-8409
ifried@mednet.ucla.edu

Dr. Fried is Professor of Neurosurgery and Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA.  He is Director of the Adult Epilepsy Surgery Program there, and is also Co-Director of the Seizure Disorder Center.  Concurrently, he is Associate Professor in Neurosurgery at Tel-Aviv University in Israel.  After obtaining a degree in physics at Tel-Aviv University, Dr. Fried completed his Ph.D. at UCLA, and went on to a medical degree at Stanford and neurosurgery training, specializing in epilepsy surgery, at Yale University.  He heads the Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory, which is centered on the opportunities to study the human brain afforded by the epilepsy surgery program at UCLA.  A small number of these patients have depth electrodes inserted in order to evaluate their seizures for subsequent surgery.  It is this opportunity that is used to record the responses of single neurons while the patient performs cognitive tasks. Some aspects of brain function that he and his collaborators have studied, particularly in the medial temporal lobe, are visual perception, memory, navigation, imagery, and motor function.  
 

Arne Ekstrom, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
(310) 794-9360
aekstrom@mednet.ucla.edu

Dr. Ekstrom is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA, working with Drs. Susan Bookheimer and Itzhak Fried He is interested in how the fMRI BOLD signal correlates with singe unit firing and slow EEG potentials in the human medial temporal lobe. His doctoral dissertation on neuronal responses during human navigation was completed in Dr. Michael Kahana's laboratory in collaboration with Dr. Fried, using the Yellow Cab VR engine as a virtual navigation paradigm. Previously his master’s work with Dr. Bruce McNaughton at the University of Arizona, was on dynamically changing place representation in rodents.

Roy Mukamel, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
(310) 206-2200
rmukamel@ucla.edu

Dr. Mukamel did his graduate work in the laboratory of Dr. Rafael Malach in the department of Neuroscience at the Weizmann Institute of Science where he used fMRI to study temporal properties of neurons in higher-order visual areas and studied single unit responses in collaboration with Dr. Fried. Recording from auditory cortex, he found strong coupling between the electrophysiological data (spike trains and LFP's) and the fMRI signal. As a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA, he continues to study the temporal dynamics of single neuron responses in human auditory cortex during natural audition, and, working with Dr. Fried and Dr. Marco Iacoboni, he is studying the mirror neuron system in humans using both electrophysiology and fMRI.

Kristen Upchurch, M.D.
Resident, Neurosurgery
Phone: (310) 794-7362
Fax: (310) 267-2707

Dr. Upchurch is a UCLA neurosurgery resident specializing in Epilepsy Surgery. She assists Dr. Fried in the OR with the epilepsy surgery cases. In addition, she was awarded a grant by the Epilepsy Foundation for research work under Drs. Charles Wilson and Itzhak Fried, and has collaborated on a study of human memory, comparing single unit and local field potential data. Currently she is analyzing Dr. Fried's first 100 cases of depth electrode implantation at UCLA. After her training, she plans to continue parallel clinical and research work in epilepsy as well as studies of human cognitive function.

Irene Wainwright, Ph.D.
Administrative Assistant
UCLA Division of Neurosurgery
BOX 957039, 18-225 NPI
740 Westwood Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095-7039
(310) 825-8409
iwainwright@mednet.ucla.edu

Brooke Salaz, B.A.
Administrative Assistant
UCLA Division of Neurosurgery
BOX 957039, 18-225 NPI
740 Westwood Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095-7039
(310) 825-8409
bsalaz@mednet.ucla.edu

Anna Postolova, B.A.
Research Associate

Anna recently joined the Dr. Fried’s laboratory. She has a B.S. in Psychobiology from UCLA.  She has assisted with rodent research on PTSD for the Psychology Department at UCLA, as well as a rodent model of addiction with Dr. Robert Pechnick, at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Neelroop Parikshak, B.A.
Research Associate

Neel is a research associate working in the laboratories of both Dr. Fried and Dr. Paul Thompson (Laboratory of Neural Imaging, UCLA).  He is interested in decoding neural signals in order to learn more about the human brain encodes information and ultimately in using these signals to drive engineered devices (Brain-Machine Interfacing).  He currently holds a B.A. in Biochemistry and Cell Biology and a B.A. in Mathematics from Rice University.

UCLA Clinical Neurophysiology Laboratory

Richard Staba, Ph.D., Director
Assistant Professor, Neurology
310-825-8479
rstaba@mednet.ucla.edu

Dr. Staba leads the team that targets depth electrode placement for monitoring seizures in a select group of epilepsy patients who are being evaluated for surgical treatment. He has a research program centered on depth electrode recordings, magnetic resonance imaging and in vivo microdialysis, with a special interest in the physiology of limbic seizures and sleep. After his graduate work at UCLA, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at University of Colorado at Boulder and recently returned to UCLA to take up his present position.

Anatole Bragin, Ph.D.

Tony A. Fields, B.S.
Senior Development Engineer, Neurology
310-825-6268
tafields@ucla.edu

For over 18 years Tony Fields has provided his expertise in electronics and innovative computer solutions to the depth electrode implantation clinical and research program.

Eric J. Behnke, B.S.
Clinical Specialist
310-206-2922
ebehnke@mednet.ucla.edu

For more than 20 years, Eric Behnke has assisted in the epilepsy program in the operating room as well as being responsible for the design and fabrication of the recording and stimulation electrodes.

Jennifer Ogren, B.A.
Graduate Student, Neurobiology
310-206-4178

Jennifer Ogren did her undergraduate work at Boston College, and is now working with Drs. Staba and Jerome Engel, Jr., on high frequency oscillations in the human hippocampus.

UCLA Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences Department

Susan Bookheimer, Ph.D.
Professor
(310) 794-6386
sbook@ucla.edu

Dr. Bookheimer has a broad interest in the study of human cognition in relation to brain structure, function and pathology. She has special interests in epilepsy, autism, and Alzheimer’s Disease. Her experimental expertise includes structural and functional MRI, PET, and intraoperative electrocortical stimulation mapping (ESM), as well as classical neuropsychological approaches. Dr. Bookheimer received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology specializing in neuropsychology from Wayne State University. She interned at Yale University and was a lecturer there before holding a postdoctoral fellowship at NIH and then taking up a faculty position at UCLA.

Marco Iacoboni, M.D. Ph.D.
Professor
iacoboni@ucla.edu

Dr. Iacoboni is Director of the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation lab of the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at UCLA. He obtained his M.D. and Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the University “La Sapienza” of Rome, Italy. His research focuses on the neural basis of sensory-motor integration, imitation and social cognition in humans, with emphasis on the mirror neuron system. He is currently collaborating with Dr. Fried’s laboratory in an investigation of human mirror neurons with depth electrodes implanted in neurosurgical patients.

UCLA Department of Psychology

Barbara Knowlton, Ph.D.
Professor
(310) 825-5917
knowlton@psych.ucla.edu

Dr. Knowlton’s interests are in the brain systems involved in learning and memory. She is currently a professor in the UCLA Psychology Department. Her research involves functional neuroimaging, testing patients with neuropsychological disorders, and behavioral studies in neurologically intact subjects. She has a long-standing collaboration with Dr. Fried in human memory studies at the level of the single neuron. Her recent work in collaborative study focused on the neural substrates of episodic memory, and how medial temporal lobe circuits can encode and retrieve these memories for specific events.

Indre Viskontas, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Memory & Aging Center
University of California, San Francisco
350 Parnassus Ave Ste 706
San Francisco, CA
94143
(415) 476-8820
iviskontas@memory.ucsf.edu

Dr. Viskontas’ primary research interest is the neural basis of declarative memory, particularly in autobiographical and episodic memory. She employs three approaches: a) studies of populations with impaired memory functioning, b) functional neuro-imaging and c) single neuron recordings in patients with epilepsy. She is also interested in understanding the mechanisms underlying reasoning and higher cognition. She completed her graduate work under Dr. Knowlton at UCLA in collaboration with Dr. Fried. Currently she is working with Dr. Bruce Miller at the Memory & Aging Center at UCSF. In addition, she is conducting studies of creativity in patients with dementia.

UCLA Department of Radiology

Noriko Salamon, M.D., Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Section of Neuroradiology, Department of Radiology
10833 Le Conte Avenue CHS BL-428
Los Angeles CA
(310) 206-7308
nsalamon@mednet.ucla.edu
http://www.radiology.ucla.edu:8080/radweb/research/faculty/SalamonN.jsp 

Dr. Salamon graduated at the Showa University in Tokyo Japan, and trained in France as a Neuroradiologist. She completed her Radiology residency at Northwestern University in Chicago and joined the UCLA Radiology Faculty in 2003. Her main research interest is neuroimaging in epilepsy using high resolution 3-Tesla hippocampal imaging, diffusion tensor imaging and PET-MRI, CT-MRI fusion. In Fried's laboratory, she has worked most recently with Drs. Arne Ekstrom and Josef Parvizi.

California Institute of Technology

Christof Koch, Ph.D.
Professor
(626) 395-6054
koch@klab.caltech.edu
http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/
http://www.klab.caltech.edu/

Dr. Koch's primary interests are the investigation of consciousness at the neuronal level and how neurons process information during cognition using computational modeling. Dr. Koch received his Ph.D. in biophysics at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT. He and Dr. Fried have collaborated for many years in the areas of human visual perception, attention and consciousness.

Alexander Kraskov, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
alexander.kraskov@gmail.com

Dr. Kraskov's interests are in electrophysiology and computational neuroscience of the primate and human visual and motor systems. He completed his Ph.D. at the Research Center Jelich in Germany. As a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Koch at Caltech, he collaborated with Dr. Fried on a study of LFPs in the human medial temporal lobe and he continues with a study comparing neuronal responses to a physical stimulus versus the perceived identity of a person.  He is presently a Senior Research Fellow at the University College of London Institute of Neuroscience.

Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
http://www.vis.caltech.edu/~rodri/short-cv.pdf 

Dr. Quian Quiroga is currently Associate Professor at the University of Leicester, UK. His graduate work was in physics at the University of Buenos Aires and signal analysis at the Medical University of Luebeck, Germany. He went on to postdoctoral fellowships at the Research Center of Jelich, Germany, and at Caltech with Dr. Christof Koch, and collaborating with Dr. Fried. He is interested in how the brain encodes information of high level sensory and cognitive processes in the activity of neural populations. In particular, he studies neural correlates of visual perception and memory. His work also involves the development of advanced methods to analyze data from multiple single cell recordings. This includes the use of wavelets, statistical mechanics, chaos theory and synchronization measures.

Florian Mormann, M.D., Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
California Institute of Technology
Division of Biology, 216-76
1200 E. California Blvd.
Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
Phone: (626) 395-8962
Fax: (626) 796-8876
florian@klab.caltech.edu
http://www.meb.uni-bonn.de/epileptologie/staff/mormann/mormann_en.htm

Dr. Mormann is a postdoctoral research fellow working with Dr. Koch at the California Institute of Technology. He has both clinical and research background in neurology and physics respectively. His current research interests include collaboration with Dr. Fried on studies of neural processing in the human medial temporal lobe, cortical oscillations, and seizure prediction from EEG time series.

Moran Cerf, M.A.
Graduate Student
(310) 400-9410
moran@klab.caltech.edu

Moran Cerf received his B.Sc in Physics and his M.A in Philosophy of Science at Tel-Aviv University. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Neuroscience under the supervision of Dr. Koch at the California Institute of Technology. In collaboration with the Fried Lab, he is using biofeedback to explore conscious control of single neurons in the human brain.

Stephen Waydo, B.S.
Graduate Student
http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~waydo/

Stephen Waydo is a Ph.D. candidate in the lab of Dr. Christof Koch at Caltech. His undergraduate degree is in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington. His research interests involve the representation and transformation of information in the human ventral visual pathway. In particular, he is investigating how information such as object identity represented only implicitly at the level of retina and V1 comes to be represented explicitly further along the visual hierarchy. To that end, he is building computational models that seek to reproduce the sparse, selective "Jennifer Aniston cell" behavior observed in the human MTL in Dr. Fried's lab.

University of Pennsylvania

Michael Kahana, Ph.D.
Professor
3401 Walnut St. Room 303C
Philadelphia, PA 19104
(215) 746-3501
kahana@psych.upenn.edu
http://memory.psych.upenn.edu/~kahana/
http://memory.psych.upenn.edu/

Dr. Kahana is interested in human episodic memory for verbal, visual and spatial information. To study this general problem, he conducts experiments that measure behavioral and electrophysiological responses during memory tasks, and develops computational models to explain the resulting data. His laboratory studies the electrophysiological responses of neurons through direct intracranial electroencephalographic (iEEG) recording from the human brain as well as single unit in collaboration with Dr. Fried. Current projects include studies of spatial navigation using a virtual taxi driver navigation paradigm, and computational modeling of the role of temporal context in visual and verbal memory.

Joshua Jacobs, B.A.
Graduate Student
(215) 746-3500
jojacobs@
med.upenn.edu
joshjacobs@alum.mit.edu
http://memory.psych.upenn.edu/~josh/

Josh Jacobs is a graduate student in neuroscience in Dr. Michael Kahana's laboratory. He is interested in neural electrophysiological mechanisms underlying cognitive function. His present research involves analysis of human scalp and intracranial EEG oscillation and single-neuron spiking, using techniques from statistics, machine learning, and computational modeling.

Matthew Mollison, B.A
Research Associate
3401 Walnut St. Room 303C
Philadelphia, PA 19104
(215) 746-0407
mollison@psych.upenn.edu

After receiving his undergraduate degree in psychology at Brandeis University in 2005, Matthew joined Dr. Michael Kahana's lab at the University of Pennsylvania as a full-time research specialist. He is interested in the correlation of electrophysiological brain responses with task behavior in three-dimensional virtual environments.

Weizmann Institute of Science

Rafael Malach, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Neurobiology
Weizmann Institute of Science
Rehovot, 76100, Israel
(Tel) 972-8-9342441
(Fax) 972-8-9346188
rafi.malach@weizmann.ac.il

In broad terms Dr. Malach's research focuses on how the neuronal circuitry in the human brain translates a stream of sensory stimuli into meaningful perception. Dr. Malach received his PhD in Physiological Optics from U.C. Berkeley and did his post-doctoral research at MIT. His research has shifted from the study of the primate brain to the human cerebral cortex using fMRI, IEEG, and single unit recordings. and a variety of strategies including adaptation paradigms, backward masking, and naturalistic stimuli. He has a long-standing collaboration with Dr. Fried.

Ariel Tankus, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Division of Neurosurgery
Box 957039
UCLA Medical Center
740 Westwood Plaza
Los Angeles CA 90095-7039
(310) 825-8409
arielta@gmail.com
http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~arielt/

Dr. Tankus has a Ph.D. in Computer Science, in the field of Computer Vision, including studies in signal processing, pattern recognition and artificial neural networks. Currently his research aims to understand the role of regions in the human frontal lobe in the process of movement generation and control. This is a first step towards robust decoding of their activity and its usage in neuroprosthetic devices. In collaboration with Dr. Yeshurun of Tel-Aviv University, Dr. Flash of the Weizmann Institute of Science, and Dr. Fried, he is studying neuronal activity in the SMA, with a view to discovering mechanisms for motor sequencing and quantifying the kinematic features of human hand motion.

Yuval Nir, Ph.D.
Graduate Student
(972) 8-934-2441
yuval.nir@weizmann.ac.il

Yuval is a graduate student of neurobiology in the laboratory of Dr. Malach at the Weismann Institute. His research focuses on spatio-temporal patterns of neuronal activity in auditory and visual cortices, how such patterns are expressed during spontaneous activity and during stimulation, and how these patterns relate to non-invasive measures such as BOLD functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). He is also interested in brain-machine-interfaces and their application in clinical settings.

Hagar Gelbard-Sagiv, M.Sc.
Graduate Student
(972) 8-934-2441
hagar.gelbard@weizmann.ac.il

Hagar Sagiv is a graduate student in Dr. Malach’s Lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. She has a Master’s degree in biological physics and is currently studying the relationship between the fMRI and single unit recordings, including studies of the auditory cortex and medial temporal lobe in humans.

Alumni

Katherine Cameron, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences
Johns Hopkins Universtiy
136 Arnes Hall
3400 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218
410-516-3914

Dr. Cameron did her graduate work with Dr. Fried on single neuron responses during memory tasks. After several years as Assistant Professor at Washington College, Maryland, she is now in Craig Stark’s laboratory at John Hopkins University working on high-resolution sub-field imaging of the medial temporal lobe.

Gabriel Kreimann, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
(617) 919-2530
Gabriel.kreiman@childrens.harvard.edu
http://www.childrenshospital.org/research/kreimanlab

Dr. Kreiman completed his Ph.D. at Caltech, working with Drs. Christof Koch and Itzhak Fried. After postdoctoral work at MIT, he is now an Assistant Professor at Children's Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kreiman's general interest is in how visual memories are represented in the temporal lobe. The lab combines computational, molecular and physiological tools to study the neuronal codes and the mechanisms and processes that transform information in the brain across different areas.

Leila Reddy, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr. Reddy is currently postdoctoral fellow at MIT, having completed her graduate work with Dr. Christof Koch, including single unit studies in collaboration with Dr. Fried on change detection and change blindness in the human medial temporal lobe.