Overview
Madineh Sedigh-Sarvestani has a BA in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College and a PhD in Engineering Science & Mechanics from Penn State University. Her doctoral work focused on statistical and computational modeling of the brain rhythms involved in epilepsy. She turned to visual neuroscience for her postdoctoral work, first with Diego Contreras and Larry Palmer at the University of Pennsylvania, and later with David Fitzpatrick at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience.
Research Focus
My lab uses multiple animal models to understand how the architecture and function of the brain’s sensory system meets the behavioral demands of the animal. One of our main goals is to understand how circuits in the visual system transform the visual inputs that arrive at the retina, the biological sensor in the back of the eye. Our other main goal is to understand how the information encoded in visual circuits is shaped by an animal’s particular movements. This understanding is pivotal to discovering how visuomotor circuits become optimized to the unique demands of individual animals, including humans. We use in vivo two-photon imaging, electrophysiology, behavioral monitoring, and mathematical modeling to understand the structure and function of visual circuits, and how they are shaped by bodily movements. In a subset of projects, we use sensors worn by the animal to record the inputs that various biological sensors, like the eye, receive during natural behaviors. Our work will contribute to understanding sensory processing in a manner more faithful to our experience as moving animals.