SCIENCE TEAM
Kashish Tiwari
Mr. Kashish Tiwari joined Project Prakash in Jan 2018 as an optometrist. He completed his B.A. in clinical optometry and internship from the C.L. Gupta Eye Institute. He has also completed his clinical fellowship at Dr. Shroff’s Charity Eye Hospital, New Delhi. He is engaged in screening children through the Project Prakash outreach screening camps. Mr. Tiwari is also the assistant to the research coordinator in conducting research experiments and maintaining patient data. Mr. Tiwari wants to build a career in ophthalmic research.
As research coordinator for Project Prakash, Dr Priti Gupta is responsible for coordination of research activities between U.S. and India, apart from formulation and validation of research studies involving close interaction with Prakash children. Dr Priti received her B.A. in Electronics from the University of Delhi, Masters in Electronics from Dayalbagh Educational Institute, Agra, MS in Software Systems from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani and PhD in Computational Neuroscience from Dayalbagh Educational Institute, Agra. Her research interests include neuromorphic design, neural development and rehabilitation, intelligent computing, evolution of species, attention, memory and physics of consciousness. Dr Priti has been a strong advocate of woman empowerment, in addition to being actively involved in a multitude of philanthropic activities pertaining to women and child welfare. She is an avid painter, talented musician and enjoys traveling.
Priti Gupta, Ph.D.
Sidney Diamond
His earliest experience in Neuroscience was as a medical student and resident, working on a multisensory interaction project in H.LTeuber’s Laboratory - then in NY. Following a three-year post-residency NIH fellowship, split between the study of language disorders and auditory physiology/psychophysics, Dr. Diamond served for more than 30 years as a senior faculty member in Neurology and Biomedical Sciences at Mt.Sinai Medical School and CUNY. On the clinical side in this period, he was an Attending Neurologist and Director of the Clinical Neurophysiology Labs at the Mt.Sinai Hospital. In 2009, through the agency of Dr. Richard Held, he began an affiliation with the Sinha Lab where he continues his involvement in Project Prakash and a number of other areas of research of interest.to the Lab, .
Sharon Gilad-Gutnick, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Researcher at M.I.T. in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Dr. Gilad-Gutnick completed her bachelor’s degree in Computational Neuroscience at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, her M.Sc. in Life Sciences and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel (under the supervision of Shimon Ullman), and her Ph.D. in the School of Psychological Sciences at Tel-Aviv University in Israel (under the supervision of Galit Yovel). Dr. Gilad-Gutnick's research focuses on cognition, specifically visual perception, development and plasticity. Her expertise lie in integrating behavioral/psychophysics data with imaging/computational approaches in order to probe visual learning mechanisms, such as those driving face-recognition. Through her extensive work with children and adults, Dr. Gilad-Gutnick has developed a strong interest in the intersection between basic and applied research, and in particular in developing and advocating for research-driven education and intervention.
Shlomit Ben-Ami, MD
Dr. Ben-Ami has worked with children and adults with disabilities throughout her career to try to understand the impact of impairments and individual differences in sensory perception on the development of high-level functions such as action understanding, person recognition, social and communicative skills and visuo-spatial intelligence. She completed her medical training in Israel, including a residency in neural rehabilitation, and joined Tamar Flash’s Motor Control Lab at the Faculty of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science of the Weizmann Institute to study sensory-motor aspects of Autism. Dr. Ben-Ami joined Pawan Sinha’s Lab for Vision Research in MIT as a post-doctoral fellow in 2017, where she explores sensitivity to the temporal structure of sensory signals, with applications in the clinical and artificial-intelligence domains.
Sruti Raja
Research fellow at M.I.T. in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Sruti received her B.A. in biomedical engineering from Boston University. She spent two years as an undergraduate visiting research fellow in the Born Lab, Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School studying visual processing, specifically the effect of feedback inactivation on the local field potential. Her current research focuses on the visual development of color perception. She also volunteers at Perkins School for the Blind as an infant/toddler aide. Sruti eventually plans to attend medical school, and hopes to become a neuro-ophthalmologist merging her clinical and research interests to improve the lives of individuals with neurovisual disorders.
Tapan Gandhi, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Delhi. Research Affiliate at M.I.T. in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He obtained his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi. Following his Ph.D. , he has spent 3+ years as postdoc at M.I.T. in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Dr. Gandhi was an INSPIRE faculty member in the Engineering and Technology category of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Govt. of India. He is recipient of NASI (National Academy of Sciences, INDIA) Young Scientist award, 2015. His research expertise spans computational neuroscience, brain imaging (EEG, MEG, fMRI), biomedical instrumentation, biomedical signal and image processing, machine learning, and rehabilitation engineering.
