Research

Currently, I am a MD-PhD student at the University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus. I am interested in continuing to study the neural basis of behavior.

Spinal Circuits and Plasticity

I was a postbaccalaureate fellow in Ariel Levine's lab at the National Institutes of Health. I am particularly interested in understanding how the spinal cord contributes to the control of movement. I contributed to numerous projects, including a review of genetic tools for studying the cellular basis of behavior, an atlas of single cell data of the mouse spinal cord after injury, and a cellular taxonomy of the adult human spinal cord (in press).

Spinal Cord Injury

As an undergraduate student in Steve Perlmutter's lab, I contributed to work in spinal cord injury and rehabilitation in rat models.

My undergraduate honors thesis on the changes in gene expression in rat spinal cords with therapy can be read here.

My code for training networks to track rats on a horizontal ladder and use heuristics to score the behavior is located here. My additional work to train a supervised training algorithm to quantify the behavior is located in this repo.

Circadian Rhythms of Students

As a high school student, I worked in Horacio de la Iglesia's lab to investigate the intersection of sleep and circadian rhythms in humans, particularly students. I continued to contribute to the project which you can read about in this paper.

Some of this code I wrote back then to process the actimetry data is publically available here. More recently, I've contributed to additional analysis of these data and the code for producing the clock plots for a poster is available here.

Published Works

Dunster GP, Hua I, Grahe A, Fleischer JG, Panda S, Wright KP Jr, Vetter C, Doherty JH, de la Iglesia HO. Daytime light exposure is a strong predictor of seasonal variation in sleep and circadian timing of university students. Journal of Pineal Research, (2022). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/jpi.12843

Matson KJE, Russ D, Kathe C, Maric D, Hua I, Krynitsky J, Pursley R, Sathyamurthy A, Squair J, Courtine G, Levine AJ. A Single Cell Atlas of Spared Tissue Below a Spinal Cord Injury Reveals Cellular Mechanisms of Repair. Nature Communications, (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-33184-1

Do Couto Nicola F, Hua I, Levine, AJ. Intersectional Genetic Tools to Study Skilled Reaching in Mice. Experimental Neurology, (2021). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.expneurol.2021.113879

In pipeline/preprints

Yadav A*, MAtson KJE*, Li L, Hua I, Petrescu J, Kang K, Alkaslasi MR, Lee DI, Hasan S, Galuta A, Dedek A, Ameri S, Parnell J, Alshardan MM, Ququmji FA, Alhamad SM, Wang AP, Poulen G, Lonjon N, Vachiery-Lahaye F, Gaur P, Nalls MA, Qi YA, Ward ME, Hildebrand ME, Mery PF, Bourinet E, Bauchet L, Tsai EC, Phatnani H, Le Pichon CE, Menon V, Levine AJ. A Cellular Taxonomy of the Adult Spinal Cord. (2022) DOI: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.25.485808v3

* = equal contribution