Sriram Jayabal, Ph.D.

Sriram Jayabal is a basic life research scientist in neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine under the supervision of Jennifer Raymond. Before assuming his current role in October 2022, Jayabal was a postdoctoral fellow in the same lab from October of 2017 to September of 2022. He received his bachelor’s degree in biotechnology in India and moved to McGill University in Canada for his graduate study. At McGill, he studied the cerebellar pathophysiology that underlies the manifestation and progression of spinocerebellar ataxia type 6 under the supervision of Alanna Watt. Fascinated with the cerebellum, a region which is now known to play diverse functional roles, he moved to the Raymond Lab at Stanford to study how cerebellum implements learning. Specifically, he is exploring the neurobiological underpinnings of meta-learning (the ability to learn to learn) at the molecular, cellular and systems level by taking advantage of the experimentally and analytically tractable oculomotor cerebellum in healthy and disease animal models. He has trained about 23 students, including undergraduate, graduate and life science research personnel. He has also won the Stanford Bio-X Star Mentor Award.

Principal Investigator: Jennifer Raymond

Fellow: Srita Kothuri

Undergraduate Fellow Project:

Project 1: Neurobiological underpinnings of meta-learning
Meta-learning, an old concept in psychology, is the ability of humans to improve the way they learn with experience. Our previous experience of learning a skill makes us better at learning another, related skill. For instance, an athlete will learn a new sport faster than someone without the same level of experience in similar learning tasks. How does the brain accomplish this powerful process of learning to learn? Even though much progress has been made in understanding the neural mechanisms of learning, the neural mechanisms of meta-learning are still an enigma. This research will address this important gap in our knowledge of brain function. Specifically, the main goal is to develop a behavioral paradigm in mice which will assess meta-learning by using well understood oculomotor learning as a model system.

Project 2: Assessing the role of cerebellum in adaptive oculomotor integration
Neural integrators are networks of neurons that perform the mathematical integral of a signal that varies over time, enabling neurons to compute and store information over different timescales. One of the most well studied neural integrators is the oculomotor integrator, first discovered in the 1960s, which holds the gaze steady when the eyes are turned away from the null position. However, the precise role of cerebellum in oculomotor integration is still an enigma. This project will use mouse models and transgenics to first investigate how the properties of the oculomotor integrator are adaptively modified by experience. Then, using optogenetics, the role of cerebellar Purkinje cells, the sole output neurons of the cerebellar cortex, in adaptive neural integration will be characterized. The SURFiN fellow will thus contribute to all aspects of the research from hypothesis formation and testing, experimental design, data collection and analysis, graphing and scientific communication.