Dr. Tara Arbab

Abstract: There is an emerging need for objective neural biomarkers of psychiatric disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) to improve efficacy of neuromodulatory interventions such as deep-brain stimulation (DBS).
In the first part of my talk, I will present local field potential (LFP) data acquired from sensing DBS devices implanted in OCD patients throughout basal-ganglia structures. We identify increased low-frequency power as a general subcortical marker of compulsions, and propose it reflects pathological coupling with cortical networks.

In the second part of my talk, I will present LFP and single-neuron data acquired from multi-site in-vivo tetrode recordings during compulsive behavior in freely moving rats. With these experiments, we aim to fundamentally understand such LFP biomarkers as a neural readout of psychiatric disease.

Bio: I am a neuroscientist specialized in in-vivo electrophysiology. My main interest is unraveling the interplay between single-neuron activity and neural-network dynamics underlying higher-level cognitive and behavioral processes, in basic function as well as in neurological and psychiatric disorders. I investigate this in various behavioral and genetic animal models of such disorders, as well as in human patients.

I obtained my PhD at the University of Amsterdam in the lab of Cyriel Pennartz under guidance of Francesco Battaglia, researching hippocampal information processing in a mouse model of intellectual disability. I embarked upon my postdoctoral studies in the group of Ingo Willuhn at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, studying cortico-striatal circuits underlying compulsive behavior in rats and mice. Currently, I am working on the characterization of intracranial biomarkers of compulsivity in OCD patients at the Amsterdam UMC department of Psychiatry.