Vitalie Cervinschi

Working under direct supervision with the Principal Investigator, Costas Anastassiou, PhD, in the Department of Neurosurgery and other Research Scientists and staff, the Research Associate Il performs routine and increasingly complex laboratory tasks and procedures and develops technical expertise in one or more areas relevant to research projects. The Research Associate Il will participate in research activities involving all aspects of the research process. The Associate will perform a variety of routine experimental protocols and procedures to support the objectives of laboratory research projects. To be more specific, our lab focuses on human electrophisiology data analysis, modelling single cell morphology and transcriptomic data modalities which will allow us to go from brain signals to systems and components - by building and characterizing bio-realistic single-cell models of human cell types to better understand the function and behavioral relevance in humans of specific components. As part of this, my personal involvement into this whole's team goal is to

develop computational methods to identify, separate and monitor selectively, the activity of multiple cell classes in extracellular recordings from the human cortex. The data analysis involves extraction of salient extracellular action potential features, alike halfwidth or repolarization slope, from brain slice recordings where we posess information about cell's t-type specificity, to feed a Machine Learninig classification algorithm. Following this, we analyze data from Neuropixel's multichannel brain recordings, as to enhance our classification model by increasing the number of extracellular AP features. We compute various feature statistical tests to try to explain the variance in cellular classes. And most recently we have started simulating various single-cell models, generated by members of the team, to extract the extracellular membrain potential and observe individual spike features' characteristics.

Assisting other students and class members during university lessons on data analysis methods and procedures in MATLAB laboratory sessions.

Under the supervision of Dr PhD Andrei Barborica and his PhD student's Costi Pistol guidance, I was creating small MATLAB scripts and functions for EEG brain recordings from interictal epileptic patients. One aim of this work was to create neuronal networks that will try and forecast future brain seizure events. This work was a collaboration between the Medical Physics Department of University of Bucharest with the C. Davila University of Medicine and Emergency Bucharest Hospital.

The work involved duties as cashier, filling end of day reports, store direct customer assistance, teamwork into offering a very good customer sales experience.