Cynthia Steinhardt, Ph.D.

Cynthia Steinhardt is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University. She graduated with an A.B. in neuroscience from Princeton University and received her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She will be working with Professor Larry Abbott on creating network models of how electric fields drive neural populations. Her focus will be on understanding how the auditory stream responds and adapts to cochlear implant stimulation, to restore complex abilities, such as speech perception to patients.

As a doctoral student working with Professor Gene Fridman, she studied how single neurons respond to pulsatile and galvanic electrical stimulation, using those results to inform neural implant algorithm designs in the cochlear system and the vestibular systems. Steinhardt’s current research focuses on understanding population-level signaling by using electrical stimulation as a research tool to perturb and drive neural computation. Through this work, she hopes to gain insights into how to improve electrical stimulation-based treatments.