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 a Professor of 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.  
 

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.

Nanthia A. Suthana, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Researcher
(310) 794-1057
nanthia@ucla.edu

Nanthia is currently a postdoctoral researcher working with Dr. Itzhak Fried in collaboration with Dr. Barbara Knowlton. Nanthia's primary research focus is on the neural basis of learning and memory. Nanthia completed her Ph.D. in Neuroscience at UCLA in the laboratory of Dr. Susan Bookheimer where she used multiple methodological approaches to study medial temporal representations of episodic information including single unit recordings in patients with epilepsy, high-resolution structural and functional MRI techniques, and imaging genetics of Alzheimer's disease. Previously, Nanthia also studied circadian rhythms in learning and memory using electrophysiological recordings to look at experience-dependent changes in neuronal activity within the hippocampus.

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

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

Vanessa Isiaka, B.A.
Research Associate
(310) 794-1057
visiaka@mednet.ucla.edu

Vanessa majored in Psychology at UCLA and has completed post baccalaureate work in Biology and Chemistry at Columbia University. Under the direction of Dr. Sidney Starkman at UCLA Medical Center, she participated in stroke research investigating the safety and efficacy of various drugs and procedures applied to patients that arrive in the ER with onset of acute ischemic stroke. She also assisted with research in the area of interventional vascular therapy at Columbia University Medical Center.

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.

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.

UCLA Department of Radiology

Noriko Salamon, M.D., Ph.D.
Associate 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.radnet.ucla.edu/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.

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.klab.caltech.edu/~florian/

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.

Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, Ph.D.
Professor

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.

Matias J. Ison, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Engineering, University of Leicester, UK
LE1 7RH, Leicester, United Kingdom
Tel: +44(0)116 252 2823
Matias.ison@gmail.com

 Dr. Ison obtained his PhD in physics from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina), working in the fields of statistical mechanics and computational physics. After further experience at LPC Caen (France), he joined Prof. Quian Quiroga's group at the University of Leicester (UK), first as a postdoc and now as an assistant professor. In collaboration with Dr. Fried and Dr. Quian Quiroga, he is currently studying the formation of memories by learning associations, and further analyzing the properties of the very sparse "Jennifer Aniston" type of neurons. His broad research interests also include applying principles from information theory and statistical mechanics to the study of neural ensembles, as well as developing quantitative techniques to extract new information from neural experimental data.

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.

Christoph Weidemann, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
3401 Walnut St., Room 302c
Philadelphia, PA 19104
(215) 573-3365
ctw@cogsci.info 
http://cogsci.info

Christoph Weidemann received his PhD in psychology and cognitive science from Indiana University, Bloomington under the direction of Prof. Richard M. Shiffrin. He is currently conducting research at the University of Pennsylvania in Dr. Michael Kahana’s lab, with a focus on human navigation. HIs interest is in the neuronal basis of integration of the process of navigation, from determination of a goal to accomplishing navigation to that goal.

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.

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, M.Sc.
Graduate Student
(972) 8-934-2441
yuval.nir@weizmann.ac.il

Yuval is completing his Ph.D. in neurobiology working with Prof. Malach at the Weizmann Institute. His current research interests focus on spatio-temporal patterns of neuronal activity during spontaneous and stimulus-evoked states, neuronal oscillations in sensory cortex, and how local measures of neuronal activity relate to non-invasive measures such as BOLD functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Yuval is planning to start a postdoctoral fellowship in sleep research.

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

Arne Ekstrom, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor

Center for Neuroscience and Department of Psychology

University of California, Davis

(530) 757-8850
adekstrom@ucdavis.edu

http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Ekstrom

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.

Katherine Cameron, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Coppin State University in Baltimore, MD
Applied Psychology and Rehabilitation Counseling Department
2500 W. North Avenue, Baltimore MD 21216
410-951-3515
kcameron@coppin.edu

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://klab.tch.harvard.edu

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.

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.

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.

Stephen Waydo, Ph.D.
http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~waydo/

Stephen Waydo worked 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. While working in Dr. Fried’s lab, he was building computational models that seek to reproduce the sparse, selective "Jennifer Aniston cell" behavior observed in the human MTL.