People

I did my PhD at Harvard with David Corey, on biophysical mechanisms of mechano-electrical transduction in hair cells, and my postdoc at Baylor College of Medicine with John Maunsell, on higher order visual processing in primate parietal cortex. In my lab at Harvard, we worked for many years with NHPs on a wide variety of questions, including neuronal mechanisms of attention, inference and flexible coding in parietal cortex; economic decision making in orbitofontal cortex; and movement initiation in the basal ganglia-thalamic-cortical circuits. A few years ago, we switched to mice, to take advantage of the incredible genetic tools available in that species. We are mainly focusing now on neuronal mechanisms of self-initiated or self-timed movements, which provide a fascinating window into the mechanisms of voluntary movements, as well as movement disorders, such as Parkinson's disease. We use a combination of electrophysiological, behavioral, optical and computational approaches.

I am currently director of the PhD Program in Neuroscience at Harvard, and also PI of an NIH R25 Research Education Program training grant that supports the PiNBAC post-bac program at Harvard. 

(psst ... Go Bills!)

MD/PhD, Harvard. Project on role of endogenous midbrain dopamine neuron activity in self-timed movements 

Currently Whitehead Fellow at Whitehead Institute/MIT (https://hamilos.wi.mit.edu/)

PhD, Harvard. Project on role of substantia nigra pars reticulata (SNR) in self-timed movements, and striatal contributions to SNR activity

BS/MS, Morehouse College/Medical School. Project on neuronal mechanisms of control of movement vigor

BS, Northeastern University

BS, UCLA. Doing a dual PhD in Philosophy and Neuroscience. Project on discovering the fundamental mechanisms of initiating movement. 

PhD, Brandeis University. Project on understanding basal ganglia's role in movement initiation.