Sirma completed her PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, where she worked on developing wearable and implantable devices for medical and neuroscience applications, with a focus on overcoming challenges around efficiency and size. Here, she became interested in neurophysiology and control systems as she developed neuromodulation tools to read and manipulate brain activity.
As a Schmidt Science Fellow, Sirma worked with Prof. Emery Brown in the Neuroscience Statistics Research lab at MIT, pivoting her research into computational neuroscience. During her Placement, she aimed to build a simplified model of complex brain activity with control systems to allow the study of various neuroscience problems such as depth of unconsciousness under anesthesia, sleep, and pain.
She is now a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT.
Sirma aims to apply hardware skills such as integrated circuit design and discrete prototyping to build optimized control systems in closed-loop neuroscience. She believes that an interdisciplinary approach in this field can help us treat various neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders and enable innovations previously undiscovered by isolated investigation.