Kofi Vordzorgbe, M.S.

Kofi Vordzorgbi is an M.D./Ph.D. student who is currently in the second year of his graduate school phase in the neuroscience program at the Emory University School of Medicine. He has been working for a year in Samuel Sober’s lab, which broadly studies mechanisms and dynamics of neural control of motor behavior using songbird and mouse models. Vordzorgbi’s thesis project specifically focuses on how the songbird brain nucleus HVC (used as a proper name) generates variable neural codes in the control of a variety of related, but divergent vocal sequences. Vordzorgbi graduated from Morehouse College in 2015 with a bachelor’s degree in music/pre-medicine, and earned a master’s degree in biomedical science (neuroscience) from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in 2018. His goal is to be a neurologist who studies and treats diseases characterized by neuroinflammation, movement disorders or neurodegeneration. Additionally, he hopes to attain skills in sampling in vivo brain activity and using computational means to decode neural control of behavior and cognition in these disease contexts.
Throughout his college and graduate school years, Vordzorgbi has engaged in mentorship of high school and college students,helping them pursue their careers in STEM. More importantly, he has benefited immensely from invaluable mentorship from doctors, researchers, his current and former principal investigators, and colleagues. He hopes to continue to provide this service to future scientists.

Principal Investigator: Samuel Sober

Fellows: Yujingai Shi & Felipe Oliveira

Undergraduate Fellow Project:

Motor actions can be described as a sequence of smaller, discrete actions, with different actions sometimes following similar trajectories to each other in space than to others. Additionally, some abilities like human speech are characterized by syllables and discrete phonemes that are arranged in variable ways to generate the variety of words and sequential syntactical rules we use. The Bengalese finch (BF) song is similar in these respects in that it, too, has multiple sequences of varying similarities and can variably string together syllables in its song. Additionally, BFs have a specialized nucleus, called the HVC, in their brains that plays a master role in generating variable neural sequences underlying this vocal behavior. This makes the BF a great model for studying neural control of sequential behavior. Kofi’s thesis aims at describing the role of interneurons within HVC in modulating the variable neural signals sent out of the nucleus. The project broadly involves surgically implanting chronic recording electrodes into HVC, recording from the singing bird under a variety of natural and experimental conditions, and computationally isolating neural spikes and characterizing their dynamics. Each of these aspects provides a unique opportunity for the SURFiN fellow to attain broad skills in planning and performing assays, as well as gaining computational skills.