About Me

I’m currently a PhD candidate at ETH Zurich studying early-stage Alzheimer’s diagnosis. My days involve working with two-photon microscopy to track how neural circuits change in behaving mice - basically trying to catch the disease’s earliest signatures before symptoms appear.

My background is a bit unusual - I started in electrical engineering before diving into neuroscience. This combination has been surprisingly useful for my research, where I’m constantly switching between analyzing neural activity patterns and building computational models to make sense of what we’re seeing.

What really drives me is understanding how biological systems compute and process information. The brain is essentially nature’s most sophisticated computer, and diseases like Alzheimer’s show us what happens when that computation breaks down. This perspective has gotten me thinking about problem-solving more broadly - the same analytical framework I use to untangle neural data applies surprisingly well to other complex systems, whether in biotech strategy or business operations.

I’m particularly interested in how discoveries in the lab eventually become real-world solutions, and I’m always excited to connect with people working on these kinds of translational challenges.

Current Research

I work under the guidance of Adrian Wanner at PSI Villigen, co-supervised by Mehmet Fatih Yanik at ETH Zurich, where I’ve:

• Established the lab’s two-photon microscopy and analysis pipeline from scratch
• Developed behavioral paradigms for training Alzheimer’s disease model mice in virtual reality environments
• Focus on working memory deficits in prodromal Alzheimer’s disease using a dynamical connectomics approach - linking neural function with structure through combined calcium imaging and electron microscopy

Connect

Feel free to reach out if you’re interested in neuroscience, computational approaches to biology, or the intersection of research and real-world applications: mohammad.sohaib@psi.ch