I am a clinician scientist and direct the UC Davis Comprehensive Epilepsy Program, a highly productive human intracranial electrophysiology research program.

My laboratory is focused on the role of the amygdala-hippocampal network in emotion, memory, and decision making. We utilize intracranial EEG recording from subdural (electrocorticography) and depth electrodes (stereoencephalography) in neurosurgical patients to perform extracellular recordings from local field potentials and single neurons. Our direct recordings from human brains have provided key insights into the oscillatory mechanisms of cognitive processing, including directional phase-amplitude coupling routing salient information from the amygdala to the hippocampus (Zheng, Nature Communications, 2016), high gamma neural activity (70-200 Hz) indexing spatial precision in the hippocampal CA1 (Stevenson, PNAS, 2018), and theta/alpha frequency multiplexing supporting mnemonic discrimination of emotional stimuli (Zheng, Neuron, 2019). We recently addressed how sharp-wave ripples coordinate frontal-hippocampal information transfer during sleep (Helfrich, Nature Communications, 2019, Skelin, PNAS, 2021).

Accepting students per funding availability.