Cynthia Steinhardt, Ph.D.

Cynthia Steinhardt is a postdoctoral research fellow in the laboratory of Professor Mark Churchland 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 University. In the Churchland lab, she will be working on understanding how electrical stimulation drives populations of neurons to produce complex behavior in the motor system.

As a doctoral student working with Dr. 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.