Sydney E. Smith

As a Neuroscience PhD candidate at UC San Diego, I specialize in neural signal analysis. Our brains produce many different kinds of signals--chemical, magnetic, electrical--and the ways that neuroscientists use these signals is essential to how we research the brain. I'm specifically interested in the brain's electrical signals, or "brain waves" that we can measure using tools like the electroencephalogram (EEG). When these electrical signals are measured in research experiments, neuroscientists use complex mathematical methods to extract information from their brain waves. This is where my research comes in: how does the math we use influence how we think about the brain? What happens when we're using that math incorrectly or misinterpreting it?

These are the questions I face every day in my research. So far, I've been able to answer some pretty big questions about brain waves and how they change in patients receiving treatment for severe depression. By challenging our assumptions about brain waves, I hope to help settle long-standing mysteries about the brain and uncover new, exciting discoveries that help us better understand how the brain works in healthy cognition and disease.

Currently, I'm a PhD candidate in the Neurosciences Graduate Program, supervised by Dr. Bradley Voytek in the Neural and Data Analytics Lab at the University of California, San Diego. I have a B.S. in Biopsychology from UC Santa Barbara and also volunteer as a writer for Stories of Women in Neuroscience, a blog and podcast that features women neuroscientists, their research, and journeys in academia.