Hamed Nili

The day I started my undergraduate studies in Electrical Engineering at Sharif University of Technology in Iran, I couldn't even imagine that my scientific journey might end up at neurosciences!

In my BSc, I specialised in Control engineering. My undergraduate project was an attempt to design a hands-free wheelchair control system. There, I used features from surface EMG signals to classify four types of hand motions in less than a 100 ms. The technique was based on Artificial neural networks. This project was the first time that I was dealing with biological systems (i.e. arm muscles) and I was really impressed by the complexities of the system. From then onward I carried on a path towards more complexity and also more proximity to the brain.

I did an MSc on applied digital signal processing in Southampton. This was followed by two years of research in Professor John Duncan's lab in the MRC CBSU. Being John's RA, I worked on single-cell data to study target detection in the PFC. 

I then started my PhD in the same department (MRC CBSU) under the supervision of Dr Nikolaus Kriegeskorte. My PhD mainly consisted of developing methods for multivariate data analysis (e.g. the RSA toolbox) and also orientation invariance in the human visual system (using fMRI).

In my post-doc in the Summerfield lab, I mostly used the methods that I developed in my PhD as tools for studying human learning. My projects spanned a range from learning abstract categories to transfer learning (the mechanisms by which learning a task would benefit our performance on similar tasks).

Feel free to email me if you want to apply for a PhD position and have interest in developing methods for analysing the information content of multivariate neural activities.