Shantanu Jadhav is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, the Neuroscience Program and the Volen National Center for Complex Systems at Brandeis University. He received his B.Tech. in engineering physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, and received his Ph.D. in biology from the University of California, San Diego, in 2008, studying somatosensory coding in the rodent whisker system in Daniel Feldman’s lab. He was a postdoc with Loren Frank at the University of California, San Francisco, from 2009 to 2014 studying hippocampal physiological mechanisms underlying memory.

The Jadhav laboratory uses rodent models to investigate the neural basis of learning, memory and decision-making. The lab addresses these questions using a combination of techniques, including behavior, large-scale multielectrode recordings in awake behaving animals, real-time detection and perturbation of neural activity patterns, targeted optogenetic interventions and computational analysis. Jadhav has uncovered novel mechanisms underlying coordinated neural activity between the hippocampus — the brain’s memory hub — and the prefrontal cortex — the brain’s executive hub — and reported multiple-timescale neural representations for memory and decision-making.

His long-term goal is to build on the basic understanding of these processes to investigate how changes in physiological mechanisms contribute to cognitive differences in neurological conditions and to develop novel intervention techniques for the manipulation of neurophysiological patterns as a systems-level target to treat cognitive challenges.