Education
2009-: M.S Biomedical Engineering, City College of New York, CUNY, New York, USA
2005-2009: B.E Biomedical Engineering, City College of New York, CUNY, New York USA
View Asif Rahman's CV PDF
Current Projects
Direct Current Field Effects on Synaptic Plasticity in Rat Motor Cortex - We hypothesized that electric field effects on the brain are highly non-uniform and is a function of neuronal orientation, ongoing activity, and the intrinsic synaptic connections. This study addresses the effects of direct current electric fields on neuronal excitability and synaptic plasticity in the rat primary motor cortex through in-vitro electrophysiological recordings of excitatory post synaptic potentials. (Background: Quantitative Neurophysiology with Applied Electric Fields)
In general my interest is in elucidating how weak electric fields can modulate brain activity using electrophysiology and computational modelling. I'm also interested in neuronal variability, noise, and dynamics of synchrony.
Research Interests
- Electrophysiology and animal studies
- In vitro and in vivo brain slice experiments provide informative characterization of field effects on neuronal elements in a controlled environment. It is a useful tool to study basic mechanisms (Reato et. al. 2010 - Electrical Stimulation on Gamma Oscillations, DC Field Effects on Cortical Plasticity)
- Neurophysiology
- Mechanistic efefcts of cortical electrical stimulation depends on the specific synaptic pathway that is stimulated. A big part of my work on DC field effects have been to characterize these pathways and the contribution of the synaptic pathway to DC field-induced excitability.
- Field-effects on synaptic plasticity in the cortex is very interesting for several reasons, including the contribution of plasticity to motor learning and the fact that non-invasive brain stimulation methods like TMS and tDCS have the most direct effect on the superficial cortical brain structures.
- Signals processing, computational modeling, and psycho-physics experiments
- I believe it's important to combine experimental work with a theoretical framework for a truly quantitative approach
- Tools: MATLAB, Neuron, CED Signal for electrophysiology recordings, Presentation. But mostly MATLAB.
Relevent Pages
- Direct Current Field Effects on Synaptic Plasticity in Rat Motor Cortex
- Role of Cortical Cell Type and Neuronal Morphology in Uniform Electric Field Stimulation
- Electrical Stimulation on Gamma Oscillations
Creative Projects
Scholared - Scholared is an online tool to manage your bibliographic content. It finds relationships between published articles on PubMed and recommends a list of related articles that can be used to generate a references list. It's also a great tool to organize your papers, generate bibliographies, and share groups of articles with colleagues.
Thoracic Endoscopy Surgery Simulator - The surgery simulator is an anatomically-accurate model of the human body, particulaly the thorax, with the proper materials and acoustic properties that enables residents and surgeons to practice ultrasound-assisted biopsies in a tactile 3D environment as opposed to a virtual computer scenario.
neuralengr.com - The Neural Engineering Lab website runs a custom content management system that I devloped. It's powered by a PHP framework that is built on the premise that content is king hiding all the administrative debris found in standard content management programs.
soterixmedical.com - I designed and maintain the Soterix Medical Inc. website in addition to my other Soterix work.