Sima Mofakham, PhD, assistant professor, Department of Neurosurgery, Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, is one of three finalists in the prestigious 2023 Stony Brook Foundation Discovery Prize.
The Stony Brook Foundation Discovery Prize supports talented early-career faculty who advance pioneering scientific breakthroughs and play a vital role in elevating Stony Brook to the next level of research excellence and innovation.
Dr. Mofakham’s research, “Promoting Neurological Recovery Through Self-Organization of ensembles encoding goal-directed behavior” will be presented on September 18, at the Wang Center at Stony Brook University. The research presentations made by each of the three finalists will be evaluated by a panel of distinguished judges. The winner of the $200,000 Discovery Prize will be announced at the conclusion of these presentations.
Dr. Mofakham joined Stony Brook in 2018. Together with neurosurgeon, Chuck Mikell, MD, at the Renaissance School of Medicine, she has worked to build a translational multidisciplinary laboratory that bridges basic science and clinical research. The Mofakham-Mikell Lab integrates theoretical and experimental work and studies human consciousness by combining intracranial recording and stimulation with computational neuroscience, machine learning and artificial intelligence. These methods are combined to develop novel models and next generation, neuromodulatory approaches to understand and facilitate recovery of consciousness after traumatic brain injury.
Dr. Mofakham completed her undergraduate and master’s training in in nuclear physics and condensed matter physics at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran. She earned her PhD in computational neuroscience at the University of Michigan, which was followed by postdoctoral training at New York University, where she built the first model describing how thalamic amplification supports the formation of neuronal ensembles representing a cognitive task such as working memory.
Learn more about the Stony Brook Foundation Discovery Prize.