Athena Akrami's lab at Sainsbury Wellcome Centre
UCL, London
Athena Akrami (group leader)
Athena joined the faculty at Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, UCL, in November 2018. She obtained her BA in Biomedical Engineering from Tehran Polytechnic (Amirkabir University of Technology) and her PhD in Computational Neuroscience from International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA, Trieste), with Alessandro Treves. She was a postdoctoral fellow at SISSA where she worked with Mathew Diamond, and then at Princeton University where she was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute fellow and worked with Carlos Brody on Parametric Working Memory.
Adedamola Onih (postdoctoral research fellow )
Dammy is one of our PhD to post-docs in the lab! He is interested in understanding how organisms perceive their sensory world and the neural code that underlies multimodal sensory integration, inference and decision making. He previously completed his Master’s in neuroscience at UCL, in the lab of Isaac Bianco, where he was involved in characterising the functional properties of a putative mid-brain circuit implicated in a model for trans-saccadic attention in teleost fish. Dammy is the first member of the LIM Lab, who joined in November 2018, as a Research Assistant. In September 2019 Dammy started his PhD at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre!
Viktor Plattner (postdoctoral research fellow)
Viktor graduated with a degree in biology in 2011 in Budapest. During his first year at university he joined László Acsády's Laboratory for Thalamus Research where he examined the driver terminal distribution in the higher order somatosensory thalamus of rodents. As a PhD student, he studied the in vivo electrophysiological properties and behaviour-related effects of an ascending glycinergic inhibitory pathway originating in the brainstem and targeting the intralaminar thalamic nuclei. Currently he is interested in the neural network representation of the environment and how previous experiences, personality and inner state alter perception. Besides his professional interest, he is also curious about human behaviour on the individual level and its changes in small and large groups. When he is outside of the lab, he enjoys going for a hike, B&W photography, bouldering and watching ballet. Viktor joined us as a Research Associate in January 2019!
Lillianne Teachen (senior research technician)
Lillianne was born and raised in New Jersey, USA. She started her career in animal research at Princeton University in Carlos Brody's lab as an Animal Behavioral Technician, before taking the role with us as a Research Assistant and working her way to be a Senior Research Technician. She also is the Chair of the SWC/Gatsby 3Rs Group since 2022 and a member of AWERB since 2023. She is a recent graduate of the Women in Leadership Course at UCL. She has always had a natural affinity for animals and sincerely enjoys working with them and promoting their wellbeing. Some other things she enjoys are walks in the countryside, reading, dancing, live music, and playing board games.
Elena Menichini (postdoctoral research fellow)
Elena is another one of our PhD to post-docs in the lab. Before that she graduated with a Master’s in Neuroscience from UCL, where she worked with Andrew MacAskill on the neural circuits involved in emotional behaviour. She is interested in the neural underpinnings of perceptual decision-making and in understanding how past experiences are stored and used to inform behaviour.
Edmund Chong (postdoctoral research fellow)
Edmund obtained his PhD in New York University where he studied the sense of smell using ‘fake odors’ generated by optogenetic brain stimulation. Moving to the LIM lab, he is interested in understanding the neural mechanisms underlying flexible operations in spatial working memory. Outside the lab, Edmund enjoys the occasional hike, modern art, Bill Evans, and immersive theatre.
George Dimitriadis (postdoctoral research fellow)
George has read Biology (AUTh, Greece), Physics (OU, UK) and Psychology (OU, UK) and has a PhD in Protein Engineering (Leeds University). He has worked in industry settings (AVACTA – instrumentation senior scientist, MindAffect – cofounder and Chief Scientific Officer) and academic ones (post docs in invasive Brain Computer Interface – Donders Institute and in intelligent behaviour – Sainsbury Wellcome Centre). He currently holds a joint SWC/Gatsby fellowship researching into transfer learning in carbon and silicon based brains, co-sponsored by Athena Akrami (SWC/LIM Lab), Peter Latham (Gatsby) and Kim Stanchenfeld (DeepMind). He is also midway a Statistics and Data Science micromasters (MITx – EdX).
Quentin Pajot-Moric (PhD student)
Quentin received his MSci in Neuroscience from UCL in 2019, where he worked with Andrew MacAskill on the effects of chronic adolescent social isolation on probabilistic reversal learning in mice. Currently, he is a Wellcome Trust Neuroscience PhD student on the Optical Biology programme at UCL and joined the LIM lab in July 2021. Quentin is interested in understanding how information is represented in the brain, and in the development of new tools that will help probe the circuit basis of the neural code. Outside of the lab, Quentin enjoys playing guitar, listening to TOOL at maximum volume, quoting his favourite movies and playing tennis.
Ella Svahn (PhD student)
Ella did her undergraduate in Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh. After graduating, she continued on as a Laboratory technician in the Surmeli lab, where she did her dissertation project. In the Surmeli lab, she worked on mapping functional connectivity to and from the Entorhinal cortex, which is relevant for memory consolidation. Ella then joined the Optical Biology PhD program at UCL in 2020, and started her PhD project joint between the MacAskill lab and the Akrami lab in 2021. She is interested in how neuromodulators may encode uncertainties of our environment, and how this allows for flexible decision making.
Kay Lee (research assistant)
Kay joined the Akrami lab with an interest in systems neuroscience, particularly the neural circuits underlying decision-making and learning. As a Research Assistant, she trains mice on sound categorization tasks to study statistical learning. Kay completed her bachelor's degree in biology and previously spent a year at a cancer immunology lab.
Lida Pentousi (research assistant)
Lida graduated from UCL in 2024 with an integrated masters in Neuroscience. During that time she joined Akrami lab as an intern and remained for her undergraduate dissertation project working on spatial working memory in rats. She will be continuing her work in the lab as a research assistant.
Audra Rybak (research assistant)
Audra joined the Akrami lab with an interest in the neural networks underpinning spatial working memory. To investigate this, she’ll be conducting electrophysiology and optogenetic experiments in rats. Before joining, Audra completed her MSc in Neuroscience at the University of Manchester, and also worked as a RA in a cognitive neuroscience lab at the University of St Andrews.
Collaborators
Ryan Low
Ryan is a research fellow at Sainsbury Wellcome Centre. He did his PhD at Princeton University, with David Tank, after finishing undergrad studies in Computer Science and Neuroscience at MIT.
Alumni
Irmak Toksoz (master’s student/research assistant)
Irmak did an MSc in Neuroscience at UCL and joined the lab in 2022 to work on her master’s thesis, focusing on blood-brain-barrier crossing AAVs and their optogenetic applications in rats. She stayed in the lab for another year as a Research Assistant after completing her master’s, continuing the virus project and also working on statistical learning in decision making. She is currently a PhD student at the Francis Crick Institute in the Znamenskiy lab, where she’s interested in studying circuit mechanisms underlying perception. She is dearly missed.
Peter Vincent (postdoctoral research fellow)
Peter is our first PhD to post-doc from the lab. He had previously graduated with a Master's in Natural Sciences from UCL, where studied Neuroscience and Statistics. He completed his final year project with Karl Friston at UCL before spending a year working with Hal Blumenfeld in Yale Medical School on neuroimaging in humans and rodents. Peter's interests are in understanding how we learn about the structure of the environment, how we assess uncertainty, and the effect this has on perception and memory. Peter was a PhD student at the Sainsbury Wellcome centre and he joined the LIM lab for his first rotation in January 2020.
Victor Pedrosa (postdoctoral research fellow)
Victor got his PhD degree in Computational Neuroscience from Imperial College London in 2019, working with Claudia Clopath. During his PhD, he collaborated with several experimental labs, working mostly on simulations of hippocampal place cells. During his first postdoc, in the Clopath lab, Victor proposed a novel inhibitory plasticity model as a mechanism supporting homeostasis, neuronal diversity, and network flexibility. He joined the LIM lab in January 2021, and he is currently interested in the mechanisms underlying the development of biased perception. He currently holds a joint ELSC-SWC Fellowship co-sponsored by Athena Akrami (SWC/LIM Lab) and Yonatan Loewenstein (ELSC). When he is not in the lab, he loves pottery, coffee, and being outdoors. Read more about Victor here.
Sharbatanu Chatterjee (research assistant)
Sharbat has obtained his bachelor's in computer science from IIT Kanpur, India and his master's in biology (neuroscience) from EPFL, Switzerland, working on computational neuroscience with Carl Petersen and Wulfram Gerstner. He is interested in neural bases of cognition, and also, language(s). Read more about Sharbat here. Sharbat joined as a Research Assistant in the lab from January, 2019!
Ben Borthwick (pre-doc researcher)
Ben graduated with a BSc in Neuroscience from UCL where he worked on interneuron migration with John Parnavelas. After a period away from neuroscience, he returned to UCL to do an MSc, joining LIM Lab to work on timescales of working memory. Having completed the MSc, he is now in the lab part-time. Broadly, his interests are in the neural correlates of memory and how they influence cognition.