Principal Investigator

Josef received his MD from the University of Oslo and PhD in neurosciences from the University of Iowa. He completed his medical internship at Mayo Clinic and Neurology Residency at BIDMC-Harvard before joining the UCLA for fellowship training in Clinical Epilepsy and Neurophysiology.  He moved to Stanford University in July 2007 and started the Human Intracranial Cognitive Electrophysiology Program (SHICEP). His research is now supported by NIH, Stanford NeuroVentures Program, and Stanford School of Medicine.  Josef's expertise is in functional mapping of the human brain using the three methods of electrocorticography, electrical brain stimulation, and functional imaging. For a full bio, see my CAP profile.

Lab Manager

Vinitha received her B.S. in Biology from the University of California, San Diego with a focus in Physiology & Neuroscience and research experience from Ramachandran’s lab.  During her time there, she became interested in cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging and is planning to pursue a PhD in Neuroscience. In her free time, Vinitha is passionate about practicing and teaching classical and modern Indian dance.

Research Fellow

Kai’s research interests have centered around the multi-scale nature of information processing in the brain, and how these can be revealed through electrocorticographic (ECoG) measurement in humans. Specifically, he (in collaboration with past and present colleagues) has examined general motifs in the power spectral density of the ECoG signal, isolating a macroscale correlate of population firing ("Broadband" spectral change - the "chi band"), and examined how this is modulated during motor and visual processing in rolandic cortex and inferotemporal cortex. He has shown that brain rhythms in the theta, alpha, and beta range actively influence local cortical activity, selectively during periods of disengagement. Kai's work with "Brain-computer interfaces" has been centered on examining how feedback can be used to probe cortical function and induce change and reorganization in the brain. He is also interested in developing tools for real-time brain mapping, and development of novel algorithms for feature extraction from ECoG signals. His ongoing research interests are primarily in two areas: 1) Examining the interaction between multiple cortical and subcortical motor areas to understand the role of large scale brain dynamics in motor disease and development of neural prosthetics and 2) Developing and using new signal processing techniques to understand how confluent and conflicting information from multiple brain areas shapes the human perceptual experience. Kai did his graduate work in medicine, physics, and neurobiology at the University of Washington with Jeffrey Ojemann, Marcel denNijs, and Rajesh Rao. In his private life, he enjoys tennis, surfing, traveling, scuba diving, and literature, but most of all, the company of his wife Dora and his son Max.

Postdoctoral Trainees

Brett received a BSc majoring in psychology and psychophysiology from Swinburne University of Technology (SUT) in Australia, graduating with first class honors in 2004. He completed his PhD in neuroscience at SUT in 2009. His thesis work focused on characterizing changes in resting electrical brain activity during anesthesia, and the implications of these findings for intraoperative monitoring of conscious state (e.g. reducing intraoperative awareness and postoperative recall). His current research seeks to connect basic physiological mechanisms of neural coordination with functional brain networks that are essential for constructing coherent conscious states and their future recall. As a confluence of these interests, he joined the lab in 2010 to study the neural population electrophysiology of human posteromedial cortex (PMC), a unique brain region with pronounced resting-state activity that has been linked to levels of conscious state (e.g. during anesthesia, sleep & seizure); and more cognitively plays an integral role in constructing episodic/autobiographical memories as part of the default-mode network. Brett explores these questions using data collected from intracranial electrophysiological recording and electrical brain stimulation procedures. To enhance these empirical studies, he also works on the modeling, analysis, and interpretation of neural population dynamics in cerebral cortex.

Dora Hermes PhD

Dora received her BSc cum laude in psychology from Utrecht University in the Netherlands in 2005 majoring in cognitive neuroscience followed by a MSc degree in neurosciences from the same university in 2007. In her PhD thesis at the Rudolf Magnus Institute of Neuroscience in Utrecht, she studied the potential of half a million neurons, and investigated spectral power changes in the ECoG signal and compared these to the fMRI BOLD response during motor and language functions.  These fundamental studies were applied in the field of brain computer interfaces (BCI) to test whether fMRI can localize an area to implant a BCI device. Her research interests are to further explore the relation between the BOLD response and neurophysiology using fMRI and ECoG and to study the ECoG signal during cognitive tasks.

Graduate Students

A Bioengineering graduate from UC Berkeley and member of Tau Beta Pi, Anthony is interested in bridging the gap between engineering and medicine. Bioelectromagnetism is a natural application for signal processing and his research has focused on decomposing neural signals to better understand the mechanisms underlying attention and cognition, as well as their disruption in pathological conditions. He has studied neural networks and nonlinear dynamics and is currently funded by Medical Scholars to study the Granger causality dynamics within the brain memory networks as measured with electrocorticography.

Jennifer received her B.Sc. in Biological and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. She was awarded Whitaker International Fellowship in 2008 to do biomedical engineering research at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland. Currently in the lab, Jennifer has received Medical Scholars Funding to study how cognition is affected during seizure in patients with medial temporal lobe epilepsy.

Muge graduated from Koc University in Electrical and Electronics Engineering.  She received her M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering at Bogazici University for her research about integrating different functional brain imaging modalities. She was a recipient of scholarship from the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey for her research on EEG and fMRI fusion. Currently she is a visiting researcher in the Lab and is exploring the characteristics of gamma band activity during different cognitive conditions. She is planning to pursue a PhD in Neuroscience and continue her studies on functional neuroimaging.

Undergraduate Students

Nikita Desai

Nikita is an undergraduate student at Stanford University majoring in Biology. Her interest in research was sparked while working at Texas Tech University on a project aimed at identifying a putative Edinger-Westphal nucleus in the frog midbrain, for which she was named an Intel Science Talent Search Semifinalist. She is interested in using ECoG and electrical brain stimulation to examine the link between neural activity and cognitive experience, consciousness in particular.

Leah Demetri

Leah is a undergraduate student at Stanford majoring in Human Biology with a concentration in Neurobiology and Human Performance. Leah has received research funding from Stanford to study the relationship between compiled data from intracranial recordings and intracranial electrical stimulations in patients with epilepsy.