Kamran Diba, PhD

Anesthesiology

Neuroscience Graduate Program

Kamran Diba’s research examines how the brain represents and replays conscious experiences in episodic memory. 

His interest in neuroscience started during his doctoral studies in high energy physics at Brown University, when he took a class taught by Dr. David Pinto on the biophysics of neuronal computation. This led to a subsequent postdoc in the lab of Christof Koch at Caltech, where he used compartmentalized models to simulate noise in neurons arising from stochastic ion channels and synapses. In Dr. Henry Lester’s lab he learned to perform measurements of this noise using whole-cell patch-clamp recordings. During this time, he also kept abreast of ongoing research by Koch lab members such as Rodrigo Quian Quiroga and Naotsugu Tsuchiya on the neuronal correlates of consciousness. 

Increasingly interested in systems neuroscience, he joined the lab of Gyorgy Buzsaki to learn to perform large-scale neuronal recordings from freely behaving rats, and observed sequential neuronal replay patterns during hippocampal sharp-wave ripples.

In the Neural Circuits and Memory lab at the University of Michigan — Kamran Diba’s lab — uses extracellular multi-site electrophysiology and neuronal manipulation techniques, such as optogenetics, to examine simultaneous spike and field recordings from hundreds of neurons in the brain during behavior and sleep. The lab focuses on the encoding, storage, and transfer of multi-neuronal sequences involved in episodic memory, which in humans is associated with conscious declarative experience.