About

Ali Danish Zaidi

PhD in Cognitive Science, Department of Computer Science, University of Tuebingen (magna cum laude)

I am a systems neuroscientist / data scientist with over 10 years of experience in both generating and analyzing complex, multi-modal datasets (fMRI, EEG, intracortical-electrophysiology), and drawing insights from them. I have a deep interest in healthcare and medical technology, and I bring domain knowledge from diverse fields such as genetics, molecular biology, systems neuroscience, and computer science. I have a passion for attacking complex problems and discovering deep insights in the fields of healthcare and medical technology.

Where I come from

I have always been fascinated by science in general, and neuroscience in particular. My favourite place to spend time as a boy was at Science World and Vancouver Public Library, where my parents took me to indulge my curiosity for understanding how things worked, or why they are the way they are.

After spending my childhood in Vancouver, CA, my family moved to Delhi, India where I attended high school and university. I was trained as a molecular biologist / biotechnologist with a focus on genetic engineering / technology. At university, even though my degree was in biotechnology, I often found myself studying “Principles of Neuroscience” by Eric Kandel, someone who I would have the wonderful pleasure of meeting, only a few years later in Germany.

For my PhD I decided to pursue my fascination for neuroscience, and joined the prestigious labs of Prof. Nikos Logothetis at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, and Prof. Niels Birbaumer at the Institute for Medical Psychology in Tuebingen, where I was investigating neurovascular coupling in non-human primates on one hand, and developing novel neurotechnologies for neurofeedback and neuro-rehabilitation on the other. I was incredibly lucky to work with some of the biggest names in the field, such as Prof. Nikos Logothetis, Prof. Niels Birbaumer, Prof. Eberhard Fetz and Prof. Ranganatha Sitaram. I submitted my thesis to the Department of Computer Science under Prof. Wolfgang Rosenstiel, the dean of the Faculty of Natural Science at the time, and Head of Computer Engineering at the Department of Computer Science, University of Tübingen. I graduated magna cum laude.

In 2017 and 2018 I was at the Wyss Center for Neurotechnology in Geneva where I was working on a number of projects ranging from novel medical devices for epilepsy or stroke monitoring to a brain-computer interface for completely locked-in patients using signals from an implanted multi-electrode array. The projects that I did there cannot be shared openly, but I would be happy to discuss non-critical aspects about them in case you’d like to know more about them.

My primary interest and focus has been in real-time signal processing and analysis of neuronal activity for neuro-rehabilitation and neural repair. This includes clustering, classification and decoding of real-time multi-modal signals. Most of the projects outlined in this blog are connected by that common theme. I’m interested in developing novel algorithms that learn to identify neural events (such as seizures), or brain-states (such as feeling happy or sad), in real-time. I’m also interested in developing neurotechnologies that enable better signal acquisition, are progressively less invasive, and safer.

An overview of these projects are in my resume.

About This Blog

This website originally started as an introduction to the work that I have done (and currently doing) in the fields of translational neuroscience and neurotechnology. However, it has slowly evolved into a more general blog where I share my thoughts on various aspects of analytics, ranging from its philosophy to its practice.