Zeinab Mohammadi

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in Joshua Glaser's lab at Northwestern University, co-advised by Lucas Pinto at the University of Chicago. I am interested in the intersection of machine learning, signal processing, and computational neuroscience to develop algorithms for analyzing neural or behavioral data. My current research focuses on applying GLM-HMM to model animal behaviors and multi-region neural analysis methods. Previously, I was a Swartz Foundation Fellow in Jonathan Pillow's lab at Princeton University, where I collaborated with BRAIN CoGS and the International Brain Laboratory (IBL). All codes related to my research are available on my GitHub page.

I got my PhD in Electrical Engineering and second Master's in Signal Processing from the University of Colorado. During my PhD program, I developed a new real-time spike sorting algorithm (GEMsort) to analyze the High-Density Microelectrode Array (HD-MEA), including Neuropixels probe data from Allen Institute. We can implement this algorithm to design a chip for a Brain-Machine Interface (BMI) to treat brain disorders such as Alzheimer's disease (see our patent for further details).

During my first Master's in Electrical Engineering, I focused on communication and wireless systems. My research was related to Multicarrier and MIMO (multiple-input and multiple-output) systems which refers to optimizing a telecommunication system using two different data encoding methods. Afterward, I collaborated on a research project in optical communication at the University of Rome and Northumbria University at Newcastle

Prior to my graduate studies, my academic journey began with a Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering-Electronics in Iran, where my thesis on 'Removing noise from medical images using wavelet transform on field-programmable gate array (FPGA)' expanded my knowledge in image processing and denoising using wavelets.

Outside of work, I can be found traveling, painting and playing badminton.

News

  • Exciting news! My paper has just been published in Nature Communications, where we uncover new insights into decision-making dynamics, Nov 2025
     
  • Poster presentation at the PCTS Workshop on the Physics of John Hopfield, Princeton University, Nov 2025
     
  • Giving a research talk at the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology (NITMB), July 2025
     
  • Presenting at the CCN statistical analysis of neural data workshop (SAND), Flatiron Institute, June 2025
     
  • Presenting GEMsort at the Frontiers in NeuroAI symposium at the Kempner Institute, Harvard University, June 2025
     
  • Participating in NeuroDataReHack with travel funding award from the Kavli Foundation, Sep 2023
     
  • Organizing the Princeton Neuroscience Institute Seminar Series, 2022
     
  • Giving a research talk at BRAIN CoGS chalk talks, July 2022 
     
  • Presenting my research at International Brain Laboratory U19 Virtual Site visit, June 2022
     
  • Participating in International Brain Laboratory annual science meeting and hackathon, Portugal, May 2022
     
  • Presenting my research work on GLM-HMM at Princeton Neuroscience Institute retreat poster session, NJ, May 2022
     
  • Presenting a paper at Pillow lab meeting with the title Tracking human skill learning with a hierarchical Bayesian sequence model, April 2022
     
  • Presenting a poster on "Identifying latent states in decision-making from cortical inactivation data" at the COSYNE conference, Portugal, March 2022
     
  • Giving a research talk at IBL on "Preliminary results on using discrete latent state model for the IBL data", March 2022
     
  • Participating in "Learning Mentoring" class by the McGraw Center at Princeton University, Spring 2022
     
  • Presenting a paper at Princeton Computational Neuroscience JC with the title Neural network dynamics, November 2021

    To read more please click here.