News


Meet us at at the American Epilepsy Society Annual Meeting in Los Angeles (Dec 5-9)! Our lab will feature 2 talks by Simon and Anli at the Novel Directions in Memory Assessment Workshop, and 5 posters presented by Anna, Jiyun, Dennis, Nick, and Anli (for Ayelet and Candice).

Anli Liu’s Investigator’s Workshop on Novel Directions in Memory Assessment was selected for the AES Annual Meeting in Los Angeles (December 6-10, 2024)! She and co-moderator Catherine Chu MD MS MA from MGH Pediatric Epilepsy will be hosting a panel of speakers who have developed behavioral assays that measure human memory function in the “real world.” Anli will speak about Naturalistic Learning Approaches for analyzing speech and speech recall; Simon Henin PhD will talk about eye movements, Daniel Drane PhD (Emory) will speak about multimodal gaming, and Nanthia Suthana PhD (UCLA) will talk about chronic electrocorticography in freely moving epilepsy patients.

The AES Translational Research Committee will be hosting a SIG called Fast Forward to Epilepsy Therapies in 2027 at the Annual AES meeting in Los Angeles (December 6-10, 2024). As chair of the TRC committee for 2024-25 season, Anli is joining Terry O’ Brien MD MS of Monash University to co-moderate a selection of pharmacological, cellular, gene-modifying, and stimulation therapies expected to be in Phase 1-3 clinical trials in the next few years. Our amazing speakers will include: Melissa Barker-Haliski PhD (University of Washington), Derek Southwell MD PhD (Duke), Lori Isom PhD (University of Michigan), and Hal Blumenfeld MD PhD (Yale).

Eden and Helen’s work on Natural Language Processing Applied to Spontaneous Recall of Famous Faces Reveals Memory Dysfunction in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Patients is now a preprint!

Welcome to Ritika Rohatgi, an undergraduate at Barnard College, who joined the lab through the BRAIN program!

Jiyun Shin will be giving a talk on Sharp Wave Ripple and IED detection in Humans and Rodents at the upcoming Gordon Epilepsy Conference in August 21-25, in New Hampshire.

Anli Liu will be speaking on Sleep, Oscillations, and Neuromodulation at the 2024 NYC Neuromodulation Conference which will be held in NYC from July 31-August 4. For the full program and registration, click here. She will also be giving a talk on Non-invasive neuromodulation approaches in Epilepsy at the Neuromodulation at the ANA Annual Meeting, from September 14 to 17, 2024 in Orlando, FL. She will also serve as a mentor and panelist for the NINDS Career Development Workshop on transitioning from a K to an R. For the full program and registration, see here.

Congratulations to Eden Tefera BS, who was accepted to UCSF for medical school! Congratulations to Dennis London MD, who graduated from NYU neurosurgery residency, and will be completing his functional neurosurgery fellowship at Stanford. We will miss them both deeply and with them the best on their West Coast adventure.

Welcome to Ayelet Rosenberg MS, a neuroscience graduate from Barnard and Weizmann Institute. Ayelet will be taking over Eden’s role as our next lab research coordinator.

Welcome to the newest members of our lab, Nick Paleologos MD PhD candidate in NYU Grossman School of Medicine and Zayn Ahmed, a third-year NYU undergraduate neuroscience major. Nick is a joint trainee with the Buzsaki Lab, investigating the link between SWRs and glucose fluctuations during sleep in humans. Zayn will be applying his computational neuroscience background to our behavioral datasets in drawing and film viewing.

Anli Liu will be giving a talk on Mechanisms of Physiological High Frequency Oscillations at the Third International Conference on HFOs at NYU Langone from May 23-25 2024. For the full program click here, and to register see here.

Anli Liu and Bill Barr just published a review article entitled Overlapping and distinct phenotypic profiles in Alzheimer’s disease and late onset epilepsy: a biologically-based approach in Frontiers of Neurology. The piece belongs to an article series on Alzheimer’s and Epilepsy, edited by Beth Leeman-Markowski MD and Keith Vossel MD PhD. Read it here.

Welcome to Forouzan Farahani PhD to the Liu Lab as a postdoctoral fellow. Forouzan recently graduated from City College New York (CCNY) with a PhD in Biomedical Engineering, where she trained in Lucas Parra’s lab. She will analyze human ECoG data and develop closed-loop neurostimulation methods. We are also welcome to Alia Seedat BA as a new research coordinator in the lab!

Congratulations to Anna Maslarova MD PhD, Jiyun Shin PhD, Eden Tefera BS, for presenting their posters at AES Orlando 2023. Eden presented her work on Natural Language Processing to Assess Memory Function Using Spontaneous Speech in the Computational Platform SIG. Anli presented Simon’s poster on eye tracking and memory function, and co-moderated the Translational Research Committee’s Symposium on Data Sharing.

Welcome to Dennis London MD, a senior neurosurgery resident at NYU. Dennis is investigating the relationship between eye movements and hippocampal activity recorded from our surgical epilepsy patients.

Welcome to Candice Zhang BS, a recent neuroscience and computer science graduate from Northwestern University. Candice will be focused on behavioral data collection and analysis.

Welcome to Benjamin Botnik and Bijay Thapaliya, our new BRAIN program trainees from the Macauley Honors College at Hunter!

Congratulations to Jonathan Rosenthal MD, who has graduated from NYU Neurology Residency and moved on to a Clinical Neurophysiology Fellowship at Mt. Sinai. Congratulations to David Collins MD PhD, who has finished his intern year at NYU and is heading to UCSF for neurology residency.

We were recently awarded with R01 “Hippocampal Neocortical Interactions during Naturalistic Learning,” which uses high-resolution hippocampal recordings to measure memory recordings during realistic task stimuli. We are looking for an outstanding research coordinator, passionate about neuroscience and medicine, detail-oriented, and people-oriented. More about each position under our jobs section.

Anli Liu will be giving Grand Rounds at Beth Israel Deaconess - Harvard on May 17, and Northwell Cohen’s Children Hospital on May 19!

Anli Liu will be moderating and speaking at the AES Investigator Workshop “Interaction between Physiological and Pathological Oscillations in Memory” at the AES Annual Meeting in Nashville, TN on Sunday December 4 at 3:15-4:45 pm.

Jennifer Gelinas MD PhD (Columbia), Ivan Soltesz PhD (Stanford), and Kareem Zaghloul MD PhD (NIH) are the featured speakers.

Congratulations to Anna Maslarova! Anna was recently awarded Walter Benjamin Postdoctoral Fellowship by the German Research Foundation.

Welcome to our newest research assistant Aaqib Mansoor! Aaqib is second-year undergraduate student at New York University with a major in biology and a minor in business.

Our review and consensus paper on detection of hippocampal sharp-wave ripples was just published in Nature Communications! This review summarizes the challenges and pitfalls of SWR detection and reporting in animals and humans, then provides constructive advice on how to address these issues.

Welcome to Jiyun Shin and Anna Maslarova! JIyun is a visiting post-doctoral fellow from the Devinsky and Melloni Labs. Anna is a visiting post-doctoral fellow from the Buszaki Lab. Both are new collaborators in the Liu Lab, examining human single-unit recordings combined with ECoG to answer questions relevant to memory and epilepsy.

Congratulations to Josh Larocque for winning an AES 2022 Young Investigator Award! His abstract on “The Effect of Interictal Epileptiform Discharges on Speed of Picture Naming” was selected as among the Top 20 of over 1300 abstracts submitted.

Welcome to Eden Tefera as our new research coordinator! She joins us after graduating from UCLA Neuroscience. And a fond farewell to Helen Borges, who moves on to pursue a PhD in Psychology at Yale.

Our review and consensus paper on methods of ripple detection in rodents, monkeys, and humans was just accepted by Nature Communications. This was a collaboration between 30+ neuroscientists working across the translational spectrum, and written with Gyorgy Buzsaki.

Welcome to Natasha Ray and Janu Tatachar. Natasha is a sophomore at UNC Chapel Hill, as a major in neuroscience and minor in chemistry. Janu recently graduated from NYU as a mathematics major and chemistry minor.

Congratulations to David Collins who was accepted to UCSF Neurology for residency and is now officially an MD PhD!

Congratulations to Helen Borges, who was accepted to Yale for a PhD Program in Psychology.

Anli Liu was featured in a Lifeline profile in Lancet Neurology. Read her views on science, parenting, and spring in New York in the age of COVID.

Congratulations to Josh Larocque for the AES Research Training Fellowship for Clinicians, for his project Exploring the Neural Basis of Naming Impairment in Patients with Epilepsy (with Adeen Flinker PhD, Orrin Devinsky MD, and Aaron Struck MD as co-mentors).

Congratulations to Haley Peters for graduating from the NYU School of Arts and Sciences with a BS in Biology with Honors, cum laude.

Congratulations to Param Shah for graduating from the NYU Moore Sloan Center for Data Science with an MS in Data Science.

Anli Liu will be giving Grand Rounds to the NYU Psychiatry Division on October 14 at 11 am, on “What Psychiatrists Need to Know About Epilepsy.” Stay tuned for more details!

Our paper on the relationship between hippocampal ripples and interictal epileptiform discharges during an associative memory task was just published in Brain! Congratulations to Simon Henin, Anita Shankar, and Helen Borges.

—-

Congratulations to Byron Sun and Xiaojing Wu for having their paper entitled "Machine Learning to Classify Relative Seizure Frequency from Chronic Electrocorticography" published in the Journal of Clinical Neurophysiology. +PDF +Pubmed

—-

Anli Liu was awarded the AAN 2021 Dreifuss-Penry Epilepsy Research Award. She will give a talk at the AAN Conference on April 17, 2021. Stay tuned.

—-

Congratulations to Simon Henin, for being promoted to Associate Research Scientist.

—-

Anli Liu will be joining the NYU Center for Cognitive Neurology. She will give a talk entitled “Novel Assessments of Memory Function” to the CCN group on March 23 at 3 pm via zoom.

—-

Haley Peters and Helen Borges will be presenting some new work at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Meeting 2021 (3/15 4-6 pm poster session), which uses Natural Language Processing to analyze speech in a free recall task in epilepsy patients.

—-

Congratulations to Simon Henin, for having his manuscript titled “Spatiotemporal dynamics between interictal epileptiform discharges and ripples during associative memory processing” accepted for publication!

—--

Congratulations to Simon Henin, for having his manuscript titled “Learning hierarchical sequence representations across human cortex and hippocampus” published in Science Advances.

—--

Congratulations to Haley Peters for winning an NYU Dean’s Undergraduate Research Fund Grant and the Julie C. Schiefflin Research Scholar Award for her project “Assessment of Episodic Memory Function through Spontaneous Spoken Recall in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Patients.”

—-

Welcome to Param Shah, a masters student at the NYU Center for Data Science. Congratulations to Param for winning a Moore Sloan CDS grant for his project “Assessment of Right Temporal Lobe Function through Drawing.”

—-

Congratulations to Simon Henin for publishing his paper entitled “Closed-loop acoustic stimulation enhances sleep oscillations but not performance” in eNeuro.

—-

Congratulations to Kristie Bauman for publishing her paper “Temporal Lobe Surgery and Memory: Lessons, Risks and Opportunities” in Epilepsy and Behavior.

—-

Anli and Simon will be presenting posters at the SFN Annual Meeting in Chicago, Oct 16-23. “Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Associative Memory Processing in Patients with Focal Epilepsy” (517.21) will be a dynamic poster on Tuesday October 22 8a-12p. “Statistical Learning Shapes Neural Sequence Representations” (696.08) will be presented on Wednesday October 23 8a-12p.

Anli was interviewed for the article “The Brain Hackers" in Nature Biotechnology, September 2019 issue. She gives her perspective on the current state of non-invasive neuromodulation, lack of mechanistic understanding, and future directions of research. +PubMed +PDF

Anli will be giving a talk entitled “Opportunities and Controversies in Transcranial Electrical Stimulation” at the Clinical Translational Investigators Meeting at the NYU Department of Psychiatry on May 24, 1230-2 pm, 1 Park Ave, 8th Floor.

Simon and Anli will present a poster on “Spatiotemporal dynamics of associative memory processing in patients with focal epilepsy” at the UPenn Context and Episodic Memory Conference, May 13.

Several folks will be presenting their posters on recent work at the NYU Neurology Research Day, May 15, 2 pm, outside of Alumni Hall A.

Our paper entitled Hippocampal gamma predicts associative memory performance as measured by acute and chronic intracranial EEG was just published in Scientific Reports. The RNS System (NeuroPace, Inc) is a chronic, closed-loop electrographic seizure detection and stimulation system which is FDA-approved for refractory focal epilepsy. Our group has adapted the clinical device for cognitive neuroscience testing in the outpatient setting. We demonstrate that the hippocampal gamma signature during successful encoding during associative learning is similar to the activity seen in the gold-standard of conventional iEEG. This proof of principle study validates the RNS System to make sensitive measurements of hippocampal dynamics during cognitive tasks in a chronic ambulatory research setting. +PDF +Link

Our paper entitled Immediate neurophysiological effects of transcranial electrical stimulation was recently published in Nature Communications. We are also delighted that it was selected as an editor’s highlight. This paper reviews the evidence for acute mechanistic effects of transcranial electrical stimulation (TES) as measured across in vitro, rodent, primate, and ex vivo and in vivo human model systems, and provides experimental and analytical recommendations for the TES scientific community. +PDF +Editor’s Highlight














Open Positions

We are always interested in motivated, talented, and creative people to join our lab.  A strong technical or clinical background is desired. Please take a look at some of our recent papers, and send a letter of interest, CV, and 3 references to helen.borges@nyulangone.org.