Sahil Moza, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow, Zhang Lab
Harvard University
Boston, USA
sahil.moza AT gmail.com

sahilmoza@fas.harvard.edu CV

I am a neuroscientist, currently working at the Zhang Lab at Harvard University, Cambridge. Electrical and biochemical circuits work together in the brain to generate behavior. I am interested in understanding how information is represented and exchanged between these different substrates and hierarchical levels.

During my PhD at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru, I worked on subthreshold neural computation and timing at the scale of individual neurons and biochemical networks.

At the neuronal level, we showed that a precise EI balance exists in the brain, where random presynaptic inputs are balanced at fast (\(\lt \tau_m\)) timescales. Moreover, precise EI balance in a feedforward EI network naturally leads to a subthreshold gain control computation , which can assimilate a wide range of subthreshold inputs and convert amplitude information into spike times.

At the molecular level, I modeled and numerically simulated all possible (~3500) small bistable chemical reaction networks. These can work as biological flip-flops and store 1 bit of chemical memory at chemical synapses. Here we showed different patterns of chemical networks that are robust to memory erasure due to different kinds of perturbations: network structure, reaction rates, and thermal noise. We present the propensity of different biochemical motifs in reliably storing information for given durations in the presense of thermal noise at small volumes, such as postsynaptic compartments (~fL).

news

Aug 21, 2022 Website updated!
Jan 13, 2021 New website up and running :smiley:!
Jan 1, 2021 Resetting old website to a swanky new one :sparkles:!

selected publications

  1. Precise excitation-inhibition balance controls gain and timing in the hippocampus
    Bhatia, Aanchal, Moza, Sahil, and Bhalla, Upinder Singh
    Elife , eLife Sciences Publications Limited (2019)
  2. Different dimensions of robustness-noise, topology and rates-are nearly independent in chemical switches
    Moza, Sahil, and Bhalla, Upinder S
    BioRxiv , Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (2020)
  3. SWITCHES: Searchable Web Interface for Topologies of CHEmical Switches.
    HarshaRani, GV, Moza, Sahil, Ramakrishnan, Naren, and Bhalla, Upinder S
    Bionformatics , Oxford University Press (2021)