Pierre Sacre, a Postdoc in the lab of ICM core faculty member Sridevi Sarma, associate professor of biomedical engineering, will receive one of the inaugural Postdoctoral Discovery Fellowships from the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute at Johns Hopkins University (Kavli NDI). The award will support Sacre’s research which aims to map the neural substrates in cognitive and limbic circuits involved in decision-making at a millisecond resolution.

Sacre, Sridevi Sarma, and Ernst Niebur, professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine, will exploit a unique opportunity to record from humans with medically-refractory epilepsy who undergo a surgical procedure for placement of depth electrodes for seizure monitoring while they perform a gambling-based decision-making task. They will combine (i) statistical modeling technique to estimate an (unobserved) internal state that they hypothesize is modulating participants’ behavior from or toward the rational reasoning and (ii) statistical analysis to examine region-specific and epoch-specific modulations in neural activity (power spectral analysis and non-parametric statistical tests).

Congratulation, Pierre!