#TraineeTuesday: Usman Farooq, PhD

From the Lab to the Limelight - Blog version of our #TraineeTuesday Twitter series

Please welcome Usman Farooq, PhD, this week's #TraineeTuesday star! This Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program (INP) alum and current postdoc in the Dragoi Lab studies the hippocampus, a brain region critical for representing space and forming memories of episodes.

Think of your middle school graduation. Do you vaguely remember what occurred? Can you recall the setting and time? Episodic memories refer to autobiographical memories of everyday events.

For Usman’s INP thesis, he found that the hippocampus must develop in three stages before it acquires the ability to store one’s first episodic-like memory. First, groups of neurons in the hippocampus become capable of representing individual locations. With age, they then become able to represent sequences of locations visited. By the third and final stage, they are able to store the sequential experiences as a memory. “Crucially, these discoveries are teaching me how our brain works/develops and how we become who we are,” he said.

Now for his postdoc, Usman is interested in how our experiences with spatial geometry early on in life may influence the development of the hippocampus. In an earlier paper, he delineated the components that make up a memory in adults. Usman found that specific neuronal activity is present in the hippocampus before an experience combines with elements “driven by” the spatial experience. This means that memories are a mixture of pre-existing and experience-driven neuronal patterns.

All the different phases of Usman’s life, across three continents, shaped him as a scientist.

Growing up in Pakistan, Usman had teachers who instilled in him a love for scientific inquiry early on. As an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, he first developed his interest in neuroscience, and discovered neural coding. To hone his research skills, Usman then moved to Singapore, where he spent three years as a research assistant at the National University of Singapore.

When it came time to hunt for a PhD program, Usman knew Yale’s INP was the right place to continue his training. He met professors studying all sorts of questions, from molecules to neural circuits to cognition. The multidisciplinary nature of Yale’s research departments couldn’t be beat. “As there are always new things about the brain to learn… be them different approaches to study the brain or different ways of looking at and thinking about the brain,” Usman said.

Usman enjoyed his time in the INP so much that he decided to stay in the Dragoi lab for his postdoc.

In the future, he hopes to start his own lab, with the goal of understanding how brains develop the ability to represent the world and enable actions in early life, from a neural coding perspective.