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 is working with Prof. Emery Brown in the Neuroscience Statistics Research lab at MIT pivoting her research into computational neuroscience. During her Placement, she aims 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.
Sirma aims to apply the 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.