Little Lab: News
October 2023: We are excited to welcome Dr. Jinxiao Zhang, PhD from Stanford University. He will be joining the lab as a postdoctoral scholar.
September 2023: We are happy to announce that Dr. Lucia Ricciardi, MD PhD will be joining the Little Lab for 6 months.
August 2023: Members of the team presented at the DBS Think Tank conference. A big congratulations to Dr. Colin Hoy and Dr. Lauren Hammer for being selected as DBS Think Tank rising star finalists and winning 3rd and 1st place respectively.
July 2023: We are excited to welcome Dr. Elena Ubeda Matzilevich who has recently graduated with her MD from The School of Medicine of the University of Navarra in Spain and will be taking over lab management and clinical research coordination!
July 2023: Little lab CRC alumnae Julia Sun is continuing her education at medical school at Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in Harlem, New York
June 2023: Dr. Colin Hoy traveled to the NIH BRAIN Initiative meeting in Washington DC to present his work on neural signals in prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia that track reward and effort during decision-making. He also gave a talk at NIH on using intracranial recordings and deep brain stimulation to study motivation.
April 2023: Little lab CRC alumnus Shravanan Ravi is continuing his career in biomedical engineering at Alta.
March 2023: Our lab is delighted to receive confirmation of a Wellcome Trust Discovery award - Investigating the fundamental neuroscience of human motivation with Dr. Masud Husain, Dr. Catherine Harmer, and Dr. Matthew Apps.
March 2023: Pria Daniel presented at the 30th anniversary meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) sharing new EEG results that support a clear-out role for sensorimotor beta oscillations in task switching.
March 2023: Dr. Colin Hoy presented at the 30th anniversary meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) on a dissociation between low frequency signatures of reward context and effort in prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia in an effort-based decision-making task
March 2023: We are very grateful for the support of the NIH and NINDS with an R01 grant investigating Sleep in Parkinson’s disease with intracranial recordings.
February 2023: Our lab is very excited to receive a UCSF Catalyst award in partnership with Dr. Reza Abbasi-Asl and Dr. Jill Ostrem to support automated quantitative diagnostics and tracking of Parkinson’s using AI.
January 2023: Dr. Colin Hoy was awarded an F32 fellowship by the BRAIN Initiative at the National Institutes of Health to study motivation deficits in Parkinson’s disease. This three year grant will fund his research on the neural mechanisms of goal-directed decision-making, which aims to uncover fundamental neurobiology of reward processing and provide biomarkers that can optimize the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of motivation dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease and other neuropsychiatric disorders.
January 2023: We are happy to announce that PS Nandini, a current graduate student at UCSF, has joined the Little Lab for lab rotations starting in October 2022. PS Nandini recently was awarded the QUAD Fellowship by Schmidt Futures, which sponsors 100 exceptional American, Japanese, Australian, and Indian master’s and doctoral students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to study in the United States.
January 2023: We are excited to welcome Dr. Bart E. K. S. Swinnen from Amsterdam who will be working on the motivation study.
January 2023: We are thrilled to be collaborating with Dr. Guy Avraham on select DBS projects.
December 2022: Little lab recently received a grant award from Google to support our intracranial Machine Learning decoding in collaboration with Dr. Reza Abbasi-Asl (UCSF).
October 2022: Pria Daniel, a current graduate student at UCSD, is collaborating with the Little lab on a neurofeedback research study. Pria’s first first-author publication is in press at Cortex and available online now! In a re-analysis of high precision MEG data, Pria, Simon, and their collaborators found increased right-inferior frontal gyrus (R-IFG) beta power during response conflict, supporting a domain general inhibitory role for R-IFG beta in switching. Additionally, Pria presented at SfN in November with her lab at UC San Diego, sharing pilot EEG results that support a clear-out role for sensorimotor beta oscillations in task switching.
November 2022: Dr. Christina Merrick and Julia Sun recently presented a poster at the Society for Neuroscience Conference on the differential effects of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) on value-based decision making.
October 2022: Dr. Fahim Anjun recently presented at the OpenMind Consortium, the Noyce Symposium, and the Society for Neuroscience conferences and presented on a variety of topics covering: Detection and removal of ECG artifacts in subcortical field potentials from Summit RC+S with template subtraction technique, Hidden microstructures of sleep using unsupervised machine learning algorithms, and Chronic motor cortical electrocorticography reveals negative correlation between slow wave and beta activity during deep NREM sleep in Parkinson’s disease.
October 2022: Daryl Lawrence, a current graduate student at UCSF mentored by Little and Starr labs, presented at the Bioelectronic Medicine Summit on research regarding the unsupervised estimation of PD symptom states using wearable data.
October 2022: Little lab postdoctoral alumnus Dr. Tanner Dixon is continuing his career at Iota Biosciences, Inc.
October 2022: Little lab postdoctoral alumnae Dr. Christina Merrick is an early employee of the startup Magnetic Tides, that is developing and testing a new non-invasive magnetic induction method to modulate cortical excitability.