Liya Ma

Principal Investigator, Associate Professor

I did my doctoral studies on neural coding of sequential instrumental actions at the University of British Columbia, with Drs. Jeremy Seamans and Anthony Phillips. With the support of a CIHR Fellowship and BrainsCAN Tier I Fellowship, I studied how frontoparietal cortical activities support cognitive control in the primate brain, with Dr. Stefan Everling at Western University. Supported by a Christine Mohrmann Fellowship, I set up my first lab in the Donders Centre for Neuroscience at Radboud University in the Netherlands to study the neural correlates underlying flexible decision making. Now I continue this line of work in a new world primate model, the common marmoset, at the Centre for Vision Research, York University in Toronto, Canada. I am a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neurophysiology.

Naeim Eslamyeh Hamedani

PhD student (Biology)

Ryley Nathaniel

PhD student (Psychology)

As a doctoral student, I am working on the behaviour and brain physiology of marmosets during an inhibitory control task. As a side project, I work on a previously recorded dataset from rats performing a win-shift/win-stay task, during which large ensembles of neurons were recorded from 2 distinct areas in their frontal cortex. My Master's thesis examined the frontal neuronal correlates for abstract task rules and how these evolve as rats gained expertise over flexible rule switching. My undergraduate Honours Thesis looking at the effects of music and emotionality on the memory of images. My interests include neuroscience, physiology and medical anthropology.

AbdulRafeh Usmani

Master's Student (Biology)

Aryana Azodi

Research Assistant