Selmaan Chettih, PhD

Selmaan earned his PhD in Neuroscience from Harvard in 2019, where he worked in the lab of Chris Harvey to develop optical tools for studying cortical dynamics underlying perception and decision-making. He then moved to Columbia for a postdoc with Dmitriy Aronov, where he pioneered the study of hippocampal activity in food-caching birds. At Yale, he started the Chettih lab in 2026 to study the neural mechanisms underlying naturalistic and dynamic cognition. The lab focuses on the remarkable memory of food-caching birds, like black-capped chickadees who remember the location of thousands of individual food items hidden throughout their territory. We pull from the rich background of research on food-caching in behavioral ecology and comparative cognition, and pioneer the development of novel tools for systems neuroscience in the chickadee including optical, electrophysiological, behavioral and computational methods. Our goal is an integrative theory of memory and decision-making connecting circuit-level neural mechanisms, cognitive behavior and computational modeling.