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Canadian Neuroscience Seminars – Post-doc series May 2, 2024: Samantha Ayoub & Mohamed Abdelhack
2024-05-02 @ 15:00 - 16:00
Date/Time: Thursday, May 2nd 2024 (3PM ET/ 12PM PT)
Zoom Link: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/83798291028
1) Speaker: Samantha Ayoub, University of California San Diego
Title: Delta-9-THC alters cognitive performance differently in HIV-1 transgenic rats compared to wildtype littermates despite no genetic differences observed in THC-induced physiological responses
Bio: Dr. Samantha Ayoub is postdoctoral fellow in the psychiatry department at the University of California San Diego researching the interactive effects of neuropsychiatric disorder and drug use on behavior and the brain. With interests that lie at the intercept of psychiatry and neuroscience, Dr. Ayoub’s work aims to define the neural mechanisms linked to transdiagnostic disordered behavior to help inform individualized treatments for psychiatric medicine. For fun, Samantha likes to go on hiking adventures with her four-legged best friend Millie.
Twitter handle: @SamanthaM_Ayoub
2) Speaker: Mohamed Abdelhack, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
Title: Sleep-insomnia superposition: the neural correlates of insomnia and their resemblance to longer sleep
Bio: Mohamed is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics working on using statistical analysis of big data and machine/deep learning to model mental health and psychiatric disorders. He mainly uses fMRI imaging, statistical data analysis, and computational modelling.
He previously worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Washington University in St. Louis where he was building machine learning models to predict post-surgical medical complications. He also worked as a researcher in Kyoto University Hospital studying neural activity markers of Schizophrenia using brain decoding and deep learning techniques. His doctoral work in Kyoto University focused on using deep learning models to understand robustness of human brain in recognizing degraded visual input.
He also founded the Arabs in Neuroscience (AiN) initiative, which is a grassroots organization that aims to enhance education and research among Arabic-speaking scientists and students all over the world. Through AiN, he runs an online introductory course in computational neuroscience. He is also a teaching assistant at the Computational Neuroscience Imbizo summer school and a member of the Africa I Know initiative.
Twitter handle: @mabdelhack
