Dr. Athena Akrami
Group Leader Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, University College London
Post-doctoral Research Fellow Princeton University
Post-doctoral Researcher SISSA/ISAS International School for Advanced Studies, Trieste
PhD in Computational Neuroscience SISSA/ISAS International School for Advanced Studies, Trieste
As a high school student, Dr. Athena Akrami had never heard of neuroscience. At that time, there was no dedicated program to study the brain in Iranian universities. Although she always had very good grades in math and physics, Athena was more interested in understanding human behavior. Growing up surrounded by a plethora of political and religious ideas, she had always wondered - ‘How can people be so complicated?’ One day, an article she read about artificial neural networks sparked a thought - perhaps she could build a brain herself? This was an ambitious goal, but during her undergraduate degree in biomedical and control engineering at the Tehran Polytechnic, Athena got quite close to it. While working on electroencephalography (EEG) signal processing, she built the first brain-computer interface (BCI) in Iran, using her brother as a subject and training him to control a cursor on a monitor. From that moment on, Athena’s passion for neuroscience has been unstoppable.
To further explore the field first-hand, Athena arranged a series of summer research internships across Europe. While visiting the lab of Prof. Alessandro Treves at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste (Italy), she became fascinated by his elegant approach to neuroscience. Guided by his physicist training, Prof. Treves was applying reductionist lenses to describe the behavior of complex systems such as neuronal networks. Athena joined Prof. Treves’ lab for a PhD in Computational Neuroscience, where she investigated how memory and perception can be explained by attractor dynamics. According to this model, while different configurations (i.e. firing rates) of populations of neurons can be more or less stable, they will eventually evolve to converge on a stable configuration, called an ‘attractor state’. Athena used this model to explain phenomena such as pattern completion, adaptation aftereffect and priming, in the context of ambiguous perception, in human behavior and monkey electrophysiology.
After her PhD, Athena joined the Tactile Perception and Learning Lab, led by Prof. Mathew Diamond, at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste. After six months of work on a computational project about hippocampal population dynamics, Athena decided to get the most out of the technical expertise of the Diamond lab. She started performing her own in vivo experiments investigating tactile perception and working memory in rodents. She adapted a powerful task from human and primates studies to the much more flexible rodent model, opening the door for more cross-species comparison and a deeper understanding of the neuronal mechanisms of working memory.
Athena’s path at the interface between computational and systems neuroscience continued with a postdoc in the lab of Prof. Carlos Brody at Princeton University. Still firmly planted in the field of working memory, Athena directed her focus to a new sensory modality: audition. At her time at Princeton, she discovered that the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) represents ‘sensory history’ in working memory, and, if inactivated, animals only pay attention to the current auditory input, without any influence of prior knowledge. In tasks where the current auditory input is important, animals perform better, while in tasks where prior knowledge is important, they perform worse. This serendipitous discovery pulled her into the field of statistical learning and the neural mechanism underlying memory maintenance and update, defining the way she is doing research today.
In 2018, Athena established her lab at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, University College London (UK). Her research focuses on how sensory information from the environment is unconsciously integrated in the brain in order to create a meaningful structure of the world around us. ‘Being a PI is every day training and learning,’ describes Athena. After the first year of hiring her team, juggling between other administrative necessities, setting up lab equipment and establishing various behavioral paradigms for rats and mice, she was finally ready to really get her research program going when her second year presented her with a unique, unforeseen challenge. In March of 2020, Athena developed COVID-19 symptoms.
While initially Athena experienced just mild flu symptoms, she ended up being hospitalized twice, four and six weeks after her symptoms began. As many others, she was experiencing the long-term effects of COVID-19, including brain fog, fatigue, and activity intolerance, among others. Doctors at the time didn’t have enough information about these symptoms, leaving Athena feeling frustrated and powerless. Relief came after reading a news article describing the same symptoms she was experiencing (now known as ‘long-COVID’), and mentioning the Body Politic Slack group, a platform where patients could share their experience with this disease. After joining the group, Athena discovered that a small team of patients was working on an online survey to collect data to quantify fellow patients’ experience. Without hesitation, she decided to join the team, leveraging her expertise in data analysis and modelling to move this initial study forward. She began to feel empowered again. After the initial survey, involving 640 participants describing around 60 symptoms, Athena led a more detailed and thorough study based on an international cohort of almost 4,000 participants. This new study investigated over 200 symptoms (almost a third of which were traced over seven months), as well as the recovery experience and daily life impacts shared by people affected by long-COVID. In less than a month, the pre-print was accessed almost 65,000 times. Despite the small detour from systems neuroscience, this was the first publication in human subjects from the Akrami Lab.
Even long-COVID could not stop Athena’s momentum in the field of neuroscience. Following the recovery from her second hospitalization, Athena joined the organizing team behind Neuromatch Academy, the first online, open-access summer school in computational neuroscience, involving almost 9,000 students across 10 different time-zones. This is just one more example of a recurring theme throughout Athena’s career: a fearlessness in challenging herself to expand her expertise. From her efforts in building the first BCI in her home country, bridging computational and in vivo work during her training, and completely stepping out of her field to investigate long-COVID, it is clear that Athena harbors an unbridled enthusiasm for science in all its forms. We can all look forward to the ground-breaking research that will undoubtedly come out of the Akrami Lab.
Find out more about the exciting research in Athena’s lab here.
Listen to her interview with Cristiana on August 20th, 2020 below or wherever you get your podcasts!
