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Athena Akrami, born March 24, 1982, is an Iranian neuroscientist who studies memory organization and its underlying mechanisms in the brain. She is currently the group leader (principal investigator) of her lab, Learning Inference & Memory (LIM) Lab, at Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL, London.

Education and Research
Athena Akrami attended Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic) in Tehran, Iran from year 2000 till 2005. There she completed her undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering and Control Engineering, with her second major (control engineering) being an exceptional award for honored students. Akrami continued her graduate studies at SISSA in Trieste, Italy in Alessandro Treves’ lab. While there, she developed a theoretical framework relating attractor dynamics to stimulus perception, which could then be applied to monkey electrophysiology, human psychophysics, and human brain imaging studies data.

Following her graduate work, Akrami transitioned into more experimental science research, and took up a postdoctoral position in Matthew Diamond's lab, Tactile Perception and Learning Lab, in December 2009. On her website she states, "Our hypothesis was that the sensorimotor system and hippocampus become coherent selectively in moments when the hippocampus must integrate tactile information into memory networks." They showed that when a rat collects sensory information, the rhythmic oscillations of the hippocampus and the vibrissal sensorimotor system synchronize. While working on this research, she also developed the Parametric Working Memory (PWM) task in rats (a task used primarily with primates). In this task, rats are given two vibratory stimuli with a delay between them, and the rats must then distinguish between the two vibrations. This task can be used, as Akrami mentions on her website, to test sensory processing, memory maintenance, and decision making. Akrami stayed at Diamond's lab till December 2012, after which she became the Howard Hughes Medical Institute postdoctoral fellow in Carlos Brody's lab at Princeton.

While at Princeton, Akrami continued her work with the PWM task and expanded it to incorporate auditory stimuli as well. In addition to this, she also developed many computational methods to interpret the PWM behavior and how it relates to the log of prior sensory information in the rat. Besides developing the PWM task, she also "combined formal algorithmic behavioral analysis, optogenetic inactivations, and electrophysiological recordings in rats to show that Posterior Parietal Cortex (PPC) is specifically involved in the representation and use of prior sensory experience in PWM."

In Fall 2018, Akrami shifted to becoming the group leader of her own lab, Learning Inference & Memory (LIM) lab, at Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL, London.

LIM Lab
Lab Focus

As the name of the lab suggests, the lab focuses on learning, inference, and memory. Researchers in the lab are interested in exploring how memory is organized, especially with information coming in constantly, and how that ties in with inference problems. How is memory history combined with new incoming information? These are the broad focuses of the lab, and as is stated on the lab's web-page:"'At LIM Lab we employ a synergistic combination of theory and experiment to tackle the fundamental principles of neuronal computations underlying sensory memory organization and sensory inference. We use high-throughput training to combine sophisticated, well-controlled and quantifiable behavioral paradigms with powerful tools to monitor and manipulate neural circuits. In all of our research programs, experiments are intertwined with hypotheses drawn from theoretical investigations and computational models.'"Main Research Questions and Goals


 * 1) " Which brain regions are required for working memory (WM)?
 * 2) What is the content of WM? (feature extraction from sensory to memory)
 * 3) What neural mechanisms underlie maintenance and update of WM?
 * 4) How are different brain regions recruited to support various timescales of WM?
 * 5) Directly test various theoretical models of WM maintenance like reverberating neural activities (Wang 1999, Brunel and Wang 2001, Leowenstein and Sompolinsky 2003), or short-term synaptic facilitations (Mongillo et al 2008)."