Biography
Dr. Diba is the principal investigator of the Neural Circuits and Memory Lab within the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Michigan. He first became interested in neuroscience while completing his doctoral studies in high energy physics at Brown University, after taking a course in computational neuroscience focused on biophysical modeling of single neurons.
He pursued a postdoc in the lab of Christof Koch, using NEURON to compartmentally model noise arising from stochastic ion channels and synapses. The predications were compared to measurements obtained from whole-cell current and voltage-clamp in cultured neurons and pyramidal cells from neocortical slices.
Increasingly, Dr. Diba became interested in how neurons function in the intact brain, embedded in dynamic circuits. In the lab of Gyorgy Buzsaki, I learned to perform large-scale neuronal recordings from the cortex of freely behaving rats and applied this to the study of sequential activity patterns in the hippocampus.
Areas of Interest
The Diba Lab is interested in the role that neuronal firing patterns play in the encoding, storage, transfer, and retrieval of information by the brain. To study this question, we focus on in-vivo extracellular recordings and computational analyses of spike trains from tens to hundreds of neurons from the hippocampus and cortex during activity and sleep, combined with optogenetic and chemogenetic manipulations.
Currently, Dr. Diba's lab investigates how neural activity in the brain encodes and stores memories using precise temporal relationships at multiple timescales and how the underlying neural circuits generate these firing patterns.
Honors & Awards
- Brown University Dissertation Fellowship (2000)
- Sloan-Swartz Postdoctoral Fellowship (2001)
- Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center Trainee Award (2010)
- Transdisciplinary Fellow, Center for 21st Century Studies, UW-Milwaukee, WI (2013)
Credentials
- Ph.D., Physics, Brown University (2002)
- B.S., Physics, University of California-Berkeley (1994)