For our February session, we will host Prasad Shirvalkar and Valentina Lind on Thursday.

Prasad Shirvalkar, MD, PhD, is a neurologist and neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, and an Associate Professor of Anesthesia. His research focuses on the neural circuits of chronic pain and the development of closed-loop deep brain stimulation therapies. His work integrates intracranial human recordings and systems neuroscience to identify brain biomarkers of pain and translate them into adaptive, feedback-driven neuromodulation strategies. He is also a practicing interventional pain specialist, implanting brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nerve stimulation devices for patients with refractory pain conditions. The title of his talk will be “Adaptive Isn’t Automatic: From Targets to Feedback Control in Closed-Loop DBS for Chronic Pain.”

Valentina Lind, PhD, is a UCL MBPhD student working between the Queen Square Unit of Functional Neurosurgery and the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health. Her research focuses on human brain connectomics in chronic pain, neurosurgery, and neuro-oncology. During her PhD at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, supervised by Dr. Harith Akram and Dr. Christian Lambert, she studied the network architecture underlying intractable chronic pain and brain tumours, and completed a UCL Bogue Fellowship at the Harvard Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics. She currently works in the Hargrave Group to define the neural circuit dependencies of high-grade gliomas using connectomics, intracranial recordings, and spatial genomics. The title of her talk will be “A Human Brain Network for Chronic Pain Alleviation.”

Recording will be posted after!