Abhilasha Joshi DPhil

Abhilasha Joshi is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Life Sciences Research Foundation fellow. She is currently pursuing her postdoctoral research in Loren Frank’s lab at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Abhilasha 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.

Abhilasha Joshi then earned her doctorate with Peter Somogyi and David Dupret at the University of Oxford as a Felix fellow. In her graduate work, she 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, Abhilasha 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. In her current research at UCSF, she is investigating the synchronization between spatial representations in the hippocampus and ongoing locomotor stepping rhythm in rats.