Hi! I’m Abuzar. I studied Physics at the University of Missouri and received my PhD in Neuroscience from Brandeis University. In my dissertation, I investigated how brain regions coordinate to process taste and attempted to show that both regions likely behave as a joint attractor network.

While this research was a first pass at using electrophysiology to investigate the dynamics of coordination between brain regions processing taste, it does not provide any information about the directionality of influence between regions in the taste circuit over time. Furthermore, the proposition that a circuit behaves as an attractor network requires recurrent interactions, and while the role of feedforward inputs in taste processing has been studies, the role of feedback projections remains unclear. My future work proposes to further elucidate the interactions between regions in the taste circuit by investigating the timeseries of influence between the gustatory cortex, basolateral amygdala, and gustatory thalamus, as well as studying the role of the feedback projections from cortex to amygdala and thalamus.

Research Interests

Broadly, I’m interested in the mechanisms underlying the dynamics of processing and neural activity in the brain. This falls under the domain of studying the brain as a dynamical system, and studying the dynamics of interactions in the brain.