Khaledi Nasab Receives APS Travel Award to Attend Conference

Ali Khaledi Nasab with 2018 Nobel Laureate Donna Strickland

Ali Khaledi Nasab received an American Physical Society (APS) Division of Biological Physics 2019 Student Travel Award. His grant helped to defray costs to attend the annual APS meeting in Boston last March where he presented a paper, Dynamics of excitable tree networks: Application to sensory neurons. Khaledi Nasab is a doctoral student in Physics & Astronomy.

Khaledi Nasab’s research is devoted to the understanding of dynamical principles of functioning and information processing in sensory neurons with a tree-like morphology of their myelinated terminals. “Examples of such neurons include the sensory innervation of muscle spindles, pain receptors, mechanoreceptors, and electroreceptors,” said Alexander Neiman, Professor of Physics and Khaledi Nasab’s dissertation adviser.  “We use theoretical and computational approaches to understand mechanisms of spike generations and information coding in these neurons.”

Khaledi Nasab enjoyed the diverse talks and met well-known scholars in the field. “I made many new friends and had meals with some of the best physicists in my field. I visited one of our department’s colloquium speakers from MIT (John Bush) and even met the 2018 Nobel Laureates Donna Strickland and Gerard Mourou,” he said. “Dr. Strickland was very approachable and meeting her was a highlight. Attending these kinds of meeting allow graduate students a chance to meet top scientists and know where we stand with our research.”