Eddy Albarran, Ph.D.

Eddy Albarran is a postdoctoral research scientist in the laboratory of Dr. Rui Costa in the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University. He earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University where he worked with Carla Shatz and Jun Ding.

In his doctoral studies, Albarran worked on elucidating novel mechanisms that regulate the plasticity of motor circuit synapses. Combining in vivo imaging of synapses in animals learning new motor skills, with electrophysiology recordings of synaptic activity in motor cortex and the striatum, Albarran’s work described new roles of synaptic proteins in controlling the rules of synaptic plasticity and motor learning.

For his postdoctoral work with Drs. Rui Costa and Darcy Peterka, Albarran is using a brain-machine interface paradigm to probe how dopamine orchestrates the sculpting of neural circuits during reinforcement learning.