Hi, I’m Smrithi. I am a neuroscientist and engineer living in Seattle, Washington with my amazing daughter and husband. I grew up in Bangalore, India and moved to the United States for college. I studied Biomedical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. I then moved to Boston to pursue a PhD, also in Biomedical Engineering, at Boston University. I am now a Scientist at the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics in Seattle.

How does the brain recovery from injury? And how can we use this knowledge to improve people’s lives? These are the questions that drive my research.

I fell in love with brain research as an undergraduate research assistant in Jeffrey Capadona’s lab at Case Western. I spent my summers and most of my non-class hours in the lab, staining mouse brain slices and counting neurons. I studied how the brain responds to implanted electrodes with the goal of improving the longevity of neural implants. This is when my love-hate relationship with mice began.

I then entered a PhD program in Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. My thesis work, in David Boas’ lab, focused on understanding the evolution of neurovascular coupling during stroke recovery. I developed and applied multimodal imaging techniques to study the dynamics of blood flow and neural activity in the brain before and after stroke.

After the completion of my PhD, I moved to Seattle to join the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics as a postdoc. As part of the Optical Physiology team in Neural Dynamics, I develop and use imaging techniques to study the dynamics of neuromodulators and neurotransmitters (think dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine) across different brain regions during decision making behaviors in mice.

Other fun things about me, I enjoy hand-tool woodworking and looking at data on India. I am trying to write more about these things on my blog. I also trained in Indian classical dance (Bharatanatyam) for 12 years.