People

Lab Director

Yalda Shahriari, Ph.D.

Dr. Yalda Shahriari is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and the director of NeuralPC Lab at the University of Rhode Island. Her research interests are biomedical signal processing, brain-computer interface (BCI), machine learning algorithms, healthcare units, and biomedical statistical data analysis.

Dr. Shahriari joined URI in 2016 after completing her postdoctoral studies at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), following the achievement of her PhD at the Old Dominion University in 2015. Dr. Shahriari is the recipient of multiple National Science Foundation awards, including NSF/DARE, NSF/NCS, NSF/HCC, and Rhode Island IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence. She is a professional member of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) Society, Society for Neuroscience (SfN), IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology, and IEEE Signal Processing Society.

Graduate Students

John McLinden, Ph.D. Candidate

Dissertation: Electro-vascular dynamics during auditory processing: variation along the schizotypy continuum

Fall 2020 –

John is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the NeuralPC Lab. His research interests include noninvasive neuroimaging techniques, physiological processing, and the exploration of auditory processing. 

Behtom Adeli, Ph.D. Student

Dissertation: TBD

Fall 2023 –

Behtom is a Ph.D. student in Neural Engineering at the NeuralPC Lab, with research interests at the intersection of neural engineering, neuroscience, and deep learning. He is now working on developing a VR framework to elucidate visual hallucination from patients with Parkinson’s disease using multimodal neuroimaging and finding neural signatures of VH using explainable deep fusion models.

Maryam Norouzi, Ph.D. Student

Dissertation: TBD

Fall 2022-

Maryam’s research is focused on analyzing simultaneous fNIRS and EEG signals collected from subjects engaged in sustained attention tasks. The goal is to identify biomarkers linked to sustained attention and utilize these findings to develop an adaptive decoder that integrates fused fNIRS-EEG features. Furthermore, her work includes advancing novel tripolar EEG technology.

Saba Bijari, Ph.D. Student

Dissertation: TBD

Fall 2022-

Alex Cerullo, M.S. Student

Project: TBD

Spring 2023-

Graduate Alumni

Pankaj Pandey, Ph.D.

Pankaj Pandey worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the NeuralPC Lab, where his researched on decoding cognitive tasks through multimodal neuroimaging data.

He is now a postdoctoral fellow at St. Jude children’s research hospital.

Bahram Borgheai, Ph.D. 

Dissertation: Incorporating Hemodynamic Cognitive Neuromarkers for Personalized Assistive Communication Technology

Fall 2018-Spring 2022

He is currently a postdoc at Georgia Tech and Emory University School of Medicine.

Sarah Hosni, Ph.D. 

Dissertation: Multimodal Integration of Motor Imagery-based Signatures for Neural Response Classification

Fall 2017- Dec 2021

Currently a lecturer at Old Dominion University.

Roohi Jafari, Ph.D.  

Dissertation: Spectro-Temporal Based Quantification of Brain Functions in Neurological Disorders

Fall 2017-Spring 2021

Currently a postdoc at Georgia Tech and Emory University School of Medicine

Alyssa Zisk, Ph.D. 

Dissertation: Quantifying and Compensating for P300 Variations in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Fall 2018-Spring 2021

Currently a project coordinator at Communication First 

James Mcintyre, M.Sc. 

Fall 2020-Summer 2022

Debanjan Borthakur, M.Sc.

Dissertation: Quantifying the Effects of Motor Tasks on Cortico-kinematic Coherence in Parkinson’s Disease

Summer 2017-Summer 2018

Undergrad Alumni

Klara Szilagyi

Klara was a biomedical Engineering student. She is now a biostatistician at Brigham and Women’s hospital.

Oluwatobi Williams

Tobi was a Junior majoring in biomedical engineering with a minor in mathematics. His interests are in neural and genetic engineering. 

Danica Kate Ramos

Danica was a Sophomore studying Biomedical Engineering with a Minor in Mathematics and in the Pre-Med Track. Her research interests are Neural Engineering, Tissue and Cell Engineering and Medical Instrumentation. 

James Gannon

Damon Georgiou

Julia Donovan