PEOPLE Visiting Student (Former)
International Centre for Theoretical Sciences
  nikhilprabhu  ictsresin

Profile:

My journey in Science started with a Bachelors degree in Life Sciences from M.E.S College in Bangalore, India. During this time I worked on a project on the foraging behaviour of honey bees. I then went on to do my Masters in Medical Physiology from the Kasturba Medical College in Manipal, India where I worked on a project involving the physical response of blood vessels under the influence of vaso-active agents based on colour image processing in MATLAB with implications for heart disease. After my Masters I joined the lab of Dr. Aditya Murthy at the Centre for Neuroscience at the Indian Institute of Bangalore where I worked on more than one projects. The project I worked on most was a study in Monkeys where we tried to decipher the role of the Basal Ganglia in the control of temporal execution of sequential movements by examining the phenonmenon of saccade averaging. I decided to do my PhD next and started to work at INI under Prof. Richard Hahnloser where I joined a project on trying to replace metal electrode recordings with carbon fibres which have been shown to offer longevity in recording from single neurons. I discontinued my pursuit of the PhD after a year.

I am currently working on a joint project between ICTS and NCBS with Dr. Pallab Basu and Dr. Axel Brockmann where I analyse honeybee and Drosophila navigation trajectories using Python.

My long term interests are to study why we behave and make decisions the way we do with special emphasis on learnt behaviours.