Chethan Pandarinath

About Chethan Pandarinath
Dr. Pandarinath is an assistant professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Tech. His research uses electrical engineering principles and AI methods toward studying the nervous system and designing assistive devices for people with neurological disorders or injuries. During his PhD in EE at Cornell, his research focused on the early visual system and creating novel retinal prosthetic approaches to restore vision. His postdoc at Stanford with Jaimie Henderson and Krishna Shenoy, as a part of the BrainGate team, focused on improving the performance of brain-machine interfaces to restore function to people with paralysis. He is a Sloan Fellow and recipient of the 2021 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. His work has been funded by the Neilsen Foundation, NSF, DARPA, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Simons Foundation, and NIH.

Systems Neural Engineering Lab 
Learn more about Pandarinath’s work as Principal Investigator and the Systems Neural Engineering Lab here.

Deep Learning Methods to Uncover Latent Dynamics from Neural Population Activity
Large-scale recordings of neural activity are providing new opportunities to study network-level dynamics with unprecedented detail. However, the sheer volume of data and its dynamical complexity are major barriers to uncovering and interpreting these dynamics. I will present machine learning frameworks that enable inference of dynamics from neuronal population spiking activity on single trials and millisecond timescales, from diverse brain areas, and without regard to behavior. I will then demonstrate extensions that allow recovery of dynamics from two-photon calcium imaging data with surprising precision.