Dr. Zaghloul received his B.Sc. degree from MIT in 1995 and his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. His graduate work focused on developing silicon models of visual processing in the mammalian retina with Dr. Kwabena Boahen. Dr. Zaghloul completed a residency in Neurological Surgery in 2010 from the University of Pennsylvania. During this time, he completed postdoctoral research with Dr. Michael Kahana, investigating the neural correlates of human memory encoding, decision, and reward. Dr. Zaghloul has completed clinical fellowships in Epilepsy Surgery and in DBS Surgery. Dr. Zaghloul joined NINDS as a Staff Clinician in 2010, and as an Investigator in 2013. His laboratory is focused on investigating the neural mechanisms underlying human cognitive function.
Research in our lab focuses on understanding the neural correlates of human cognitive function using intracranial recordings captured during epilepsy surgery and deep brain stimulation surgery. In both cases, our lab seeks to record single unit spike activity and local field potential activity directly from the human brain of neurosurgical patients as these patients participate in different cognitive tasks, and to use computational techniques to establish how these signals correlate with different human behaviors. The larger goal of this work centers around understanding the neural code mediating such cognitive processes as memory, decision, and attention. By exploring these questions, we hope to not only gain an understanding of how the human brain processes and relays information, but to potentially open up new possibilities to directly communicate with the brain's complex networks.
