Abhilasha Joshi, D. Phil.

Abhilasha Joshi is a systems neuroscientist and assistant professor (Reader F) at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru, India. Her current research focuses on uncovering the principles that govern the interactions between internal cognitive computations and ongoing actions during complex behavior. She completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali, supported by the Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana scholarship. She then earned her doctorate with Peter Somogyi and David Dupret at the University of Oxford.

In her graduate work, Joshi discovered the cellular, synaptic and physiological properties of a specialized group of long-range projection neurons that coordinate rhythmic oscillatory activity in the hippocampus, a brain region critical for learning and memory. At the end of her doctorate, she won a seed grant from the European Institute of Technology (EIT) Health initiative to develop her idea of monitoring a potential coupling between hippocampal rhythmic oscillations and locomotor stepping rhythm in mice. For her postdoctoral studies, she moved to the University of California, San Francisco to work with Loren Frank. Here, she developed an approach to monitor neural and behavioral information at fast timescales during behavior, using this to discover that hippocampal spatial representations are linked with locomotor steps during upcoming spatial decisions. She then joined Megan Carey’s group in Lisbon as a visiting scientist at the Center for the Unknown at Champalimaud Foundation.

Joshi has been the recipient of various awards and recognitions for her contributions to neuroscience, including the Peter and Patricia Gruber Award at the Society for Neuroscience, the Life Sciences Research Foundation postdoctoral fellowship and the Healthy Aging Seed Award by the European Institute of Technology.