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Brief Bio

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I am a neuroscientist interested in how the brain accomplishes the ongoing transformation from sensation to action during natural behaviors. Currently, I study neural circuits underlying vocal communication in an exotic rodent species from Central American rainforests colloquially called the ‘singing mouse.’ These animals vocalize, alone as well as socially. This offers an exciting opportunity to study the neural dynamics and circuitry that enable a motor behavior to be used flexibly for social communication. Research in my lab combines cutting-edge neural circuit analysis of vocal behaviors in the singing mice with comparative evolutionary analyses across rodent species to gain insight into the evolution of neural circuits for mammalian vocal communication. 

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I grew up in the suburbs of Kolkata in India. I studied Biochemistry for my bachelor’s degree at University of Delhi. For my master's thesis at TIFR (Mumbai), working with Prof. Sudipta Maiti, I learnt how to build multi-photon microscopes for functional imaging. Switching to systems neuroscience, I did my Ph.D. with Dr. Florin Albeanu studying computations and neural circuits involved in olfactory sensory processing. Subsequently, as a Junior Fellow at the Simons Foundation and a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Michael Long’s lab at NYU, I became interested in motor cortical control of vocal behaviors in the Alston's singing mice