Abhijit is an electrical engineer by training and uses his quantitative skills in signal processing and machine learning to solve convoluted problems in cognitive computational neuroscience. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Bioinformatics at UBC, supervised by Dr. Todd Woodward. His work involves mathematical modeling and developing analysis workflows to process physiological and behavioral data, with an aim to better understand and treat mental disorders.
Research Project
Clinicians and researchers commonly use many questionnaires to quantify symptoms in mental disorders, yet while studying the link between these symptoms and cognitive measures, summary scores are used, thereby neglecting the rich, item-specific information offered by individual questionnaire items. In this regard, Abhijit’s novel open-source analysis framework finds relations between symptom questionnaires and cognitive measures at the level of individual variables which would be missed when summary scores are analyzed. This approach will provide a finer description of the relationship, potentially better informing future hypotheses and increasing the pace of scientific advancement.
Check out Abhijit’s presentation of his CONP project in a short talk entitled “Item-specific overlap between hallucinatory experiences and cognition in the general population: A three-step multivariate analysis of international multi-site data“.