Doc.Mobility @ Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior

Start: 01. February 2022
End: 31. July 2022
PI: Dr. Michael X Cohen
Amount: Full PhD salary of a 2nd year PhD student, including social and insurance benefits.
See website of Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior here.
See a summary of my project on the Doc.Mobility website of the University of Bern.

About Doc.Mobility
The University of Bern set up these grants to fund research abroad for Doctoral students whose research is not financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).
This grant is equivalent to a SNSF Doc.Mobility grant.
For more information about the grant click here.

My work at Dr. Cohen's lab
Before joining Dr. Cohen's lab, I had collected an extensive dataset with the aim to evaluate the effect of chronic pain at different time points after its induction.
I was interested to study the chronic pain-induced changes in the ACC and S1 during wake and sleep.

At Dr. Cohen's lab I learned and applied the following analysis to the dataset on chronic pain:
 - Demeaned Fluctuation Analysis (DMA) to evaluate the scale-free dynamics.
 - Custom-designed synchronization analysis to compute synchronization strength and duration.
 - Behavior quantification.
 - Static spectral analysis.

Dr. Cohen additionally mentored me in the following analysis for the project on acute pain of my PhD:
 - Rigorous data cleaning
 - Automatic outlier detection
 - Extraction and computation of heart rate and heart rate variability.
 - Trial-to-trial correlation of heart rate data with neural data.
 - Statistics for spectrograms and time series.

Scientific communications during the Doc. Mobility grant at Dr. Cohen's lab:
Posters
 - FENS (Paris, France)
 - ICON (Helsinki, Finland)
 - Pain Mechanisms and Therapeutics (Verona, Italy)
 - Dutch Neuroscience Meeting (Tiel, The Netherlands)
 - Annual Swiss Neuroscience Meeting (Fribourg, Switzerland)
 - ERS from ySSN (Fribourg, Switzerland)
Talks
 - 8x8 Junge Forschende Erzählen (Bern, Switzerland) Link
 - Seminar on Neuroelectrophysiology at the Master of Biotechnology, Polytechnical University (Barcelona, Spain)

See the full list of the communications during my PhD here.

The Doc. Mobility at Dr. Cohen's lab provided significant contributions to the following publications:
Sandoval Ortega R.A., Renard M., Cohen M.X., Nevian T. Interactive Effects of Pain and Arousal State on Heart Rate and Cortical Activity in the Mouse Anterior Cingulate and Somatosensory Cortices. In revision in the Journal of Neurobiology of Pain.
Sandoval Ortega R.A., Renard M., Cohen M.X., Nevian T. Chronic Pain Induces Transient Sleep Disturbances and Long-Lasting Changes in Neural Dynamics in Mice. In preparation.