Pavithra Rajeswaran, M.Eng.

Pavi Rajeswaran is a Ph.D. student also working in the Orsborn lab to study how the brain learns new motor skills using BMIs. She is studying how rest and sleep helps the brain to correlate actions with outcomes. Pavi has a master’s degree in bioinstrumentation from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she developed virtual reality tools for medical education for surgeons.

Principal Investigator: Amy Orsborn

Co-Mentor: Leo Scholl

Fellow: Jesus Cabrales Quintanilla

Undergraduate Fellow Project:
Vision is critical to guide our movements. Just imagine reaching for your coffee mug with your eyes closed. Interestingly, we actively choose where to look. Eye movements allow us to actively sample visual information and contribute to reaching computations in well-learned behaviors. This project asks whether eye movements also contribute to motor learning. The research team explores this by asking non-human primates to learn novel motor brain-machine interfaces (BMI), and then analyze interactions between eye movements and BMI, both at the level of behavior and in the brain. As part of the team, the SURF fellow will assist with real-time BMI experiments and refine methods for eye-tracking. The fellow will also use machine learning methods to identify latent interactions between eye movements, measures of arousal (e.g., pupil size), and BMI cursor control. The project is ideal training for someone interested in experimental and computational approaches in systems neuroscience, and novel ways to study learning.