Sasha Rayshubskiy, PhD
Rowland Fellow | Principal Investigator I grew up in father's cluttered electronics repair shop on the outskirts of Brooklyn, NY. There I spent my afternoons unscrewing VCR boards and trying to reverse engineer their tangled meshes. After initial training in computer science from Cornell University, I worked close to a decade as a software engineer at IBM Research. I specialized in developing parallel computing algorithms and biological simulations for the BlueGene supercomputing project. Eventually, my interests transitioned to the study of computations in neural circuits. This led me to pursue a PhD in neuroscience in Rachel Wilson's lab at Harvard University, where my research focused on the neural control of steering in walking Drosophila. In the fall of 2020, I started a lab at the Rowland Institute in Harvard University, studying neural architectures at the interface between executive and motor control. Outside the lab my passions include sailing, playing classical guitar to my daughter and cooking over wood fire. CV | Google Scholar | srayshubskiy [at] rowland.harvard.edu |
Elijah Petter, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow After developing an interest in animal behavior while studying neuroscience at Northeastern University, I began research as an undergraduate student in Michael Hasselmo’s lab at Boston University, where I studied the role of acetylcholine in spatial memory. After my time there, I started my PhD in Warren Mecks’s lab at Duke University to study how the brain learns to encode time intervals. During this research it became clear to me that time perception was inseparable from motor control. Based on these associations I wanted a broader understanding of how actions are learned, including the timing, sequence, and byproducts of learning an action. This interest led me to collaborate with Henry Yin where my dissertation research examined the role of dopamine in learning actions. Now I'm excited to start a postdoctoral fellowship in the Rayshubskiy lab. Outside of the lab I enjoy backpacking, climbing, ultimate, biking, and cooking. |
We are hiring. |