Sonya Bahar, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Biophysics
Director, Center for Neurodynamics
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Missouri at St Louis
One University Boulevard
St. Louis MO 63121
Tel: 314-516-7150
Fax: 314-516-6152
Email: bahars@umsl.edu
Education:
BS in Physics, Drexel University, 1991
MS in Biophysics, University of Rochester, 1993
PhD in Biophysics, University of Rochester, 1997
Editor (with Prof. Rudi Podgornik) of The Journal of Biological Physics , published by Springer. Editor of "The Biological Physicist", newsletter of the Division of Biological Physics, American Physical Society. Check out the latest biophysics news.Curriculum Vitae (pdf version)
RESEARCH
Over the last ten years, my research has been primarily focused on synchronization in neural systems, ranging from studies of the Neural synchronization in the crayfish caudal photoreceptor to in vivo imaging of seizure activity in the rat neocortex and human intraoperative brain imaging.
Watch seizure activity, imaged with the intrinsic optical signal, spreading through the brain.
Most recently, in my laboratory at the University of Missouri -- St Louis, I have been working with PhD student Daisuke Takeshita, to investigate computational models of neural synchronization as well as imaging synchronization during seizures in the rat neocortex. Our imaging techniques involve both the intrinsic optical signal and voltage sensitive dye imaging.
Roxana Contreras, who defended her doctoral dissertation in spring 2009, studyied eye-target synchronization in human brain trauma patients, and the relationship of this synchronization with attention and cognition.
Nathan Dees, who defended his dissertation in March 2009 and is now works at the Genome Center at Washington University in St. Louis, investigated how nonlinear dynamical techniques can reveal the relationship between the fMRI-BOLD signal and EEG recordings in human subjects. In collaborations with Frank Moss and Michael Hofmann, Nate also investigated the evolution of optimal foraging behavior in various species. Our most recent work in this field is now in press at Animal Behavior. Graduate student Kaushalya Premachandra continuing the study of animal foraging dynamics in two speices of monkey.
NEW PROJECTS FOR THE NEW DECADE
My group's research is currently in a phase of change and expansion, with an increased emphasis on computational modeling of evolutionary dynamics. Current work involves a study of the role of mutation rate in optimizing speciation in a computational model.
OLD PROJECTS FROM DAYS GONE BY...
Imaging hypoxic spreading depression in rat hippocampal slices.Bistability and hysteresis in the response of periodically paced small pieces of bullfrog cardiac tissue. Phys. Rev. Lett. 82:2995-2998, 1999.
Spatiotemporal effects of bistability in coupled map models of cardiac dynamics (published in the Proceedings of the 5th Experimental Chaos Conference, Boca Raton, Florida, July 1999).
Control of fibrillation using nonlinear dynamics based methods in the in vivo sheep heart.
Bistability and Hysteresis in the Periodically Paced Sheep Heart.
Monovalent and divalent anion transport in the band 3 and AE2 proteins (doctoral thesis).
Time Delay Embeddings of IFS Attractors
Symbolic Dynamics in IFS Attractors
Apparently Chaotic Orbits Embedded in Closed Curves written with Irene Hueter
Photo by August Jennewein