Adarsh Mukesh

PMRF Fellow since August 2018, IIT Kharagpur

Academic background:

I completed my bachelor's and master's from IIT Kharagpur in Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering (B.Tech + M.Tech, Dual degree) in 2018 with my bachelor's and master's
project in Neuroscience, focusing on developing a computational model to demonstrate deviant selectivity and tonotopy column formation within mouse auditory cortex. Prior to this,
I also did an internship in the National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore in a computational biology lab where I studied protein docking and their mechainism.
Throughout my academic course, I maintained a position within the top 3 of my batch. My research interests broadly encompass the computational and theoretical aspects of stimulus
selectivity within the brain and using the information-theoretic approach to study this. Since 2018, I have been carrying out my research in this field under the supervision of
Prof. Sharba Bandyopadhyay of E&ECE department, IIT Kharagpur. I am registered in the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) of IIT Kharagpur.

Research topics:

Spectral Feature selectivity in mouse adult auditory cortex
Spectral contrast is an important feature of the auditory stimuli that helps in recognition of sound objects in different situation.
In the coding of complex and more naturalistic stimuli, the varying contrast characteristics of the stimuli are of much importance in maximizing the representation of relavant features and reducing redundancies
in the stimulus space. In order to understand this spectral contrast selectivity shown by the auditory cortex, we probe the neural signals in response to stimuli containing variable spectral contrast.

Theoretical approach to deviant selectivity
Deviant selectivity is defined as the neural preference of rare stimuli (deviant) over a frequenct stimuli (standard). A macro-level manifestation of the deviant selectivity
gives rise to Mis-Match Negativity (MMN). We plan to see the parameters within the stimulus space and the neuronal level whose optimization can maximize the Mutual Information (MI)
between an odd-ball stimulus and the neural response, thereby enhancing the encoding abilities of the neural circuit.

Role of inhibitory neurons in long-scale adaptation in the auditory cortex
Adaptation is one of the most characteristic features of the neural circuits, aimed at reducing the redundancies from the stimulus space. The neural circuits can exhibit multiple time scales of adaptations, and
the inhibitory-neuron subtypes play an important modulatory role in shaping these responses. We wish to study these differences within the inhibitory subtype and hypothesize a possible mechanism which
can lead to such long-scale adaptations within the neural responses in the auditory cortex.

Education:

2013-2018 Bachelor's and Master's (Dual degree), Biotechnology, IIT Kharagpur (department rank 3)

Publication

• Mehra M, Mukesh A, Bandyopadhyay S. (2021) Earliest experience of a relatively rare sound but not a frequent sound causes long term changes in the adult auditory cortex,
  Journal of Neuroscience, link
• Mehra M*, Mukesh A*, Bandyopadhyay S. (2021) Separate functional subnetworks of excitatory neurons show preference to periodic and random structures.
  Journal of Neuroscience, link (*equal contrinution)
• Mukesh A, Mehra M, Bandyopadhyay S. Spectral Contrast selectivity in Excitatory and Inhibitory neurons of mouse auditory cortex (Manuscript in prepration)

Conference Presentations

• Mukesh, A., Muneshwar and Bandyopadhyay, S. Model of developing auditory cortex shows low probability stimuli as drivers of cortical organisation, Association for Research in Otolaryngology, 2018, San Diego, CA. link
• Mukherjee, A., Patel, P., Mukesh, A., Muneshwar and Bandyopadhyay, S. Spectral shape based adaptation unravels mechanisms underlying spectral contrast coding in the mouse auditory cortex (ACX), Society for Neuroscience, 2018, San Diego, CA. link
• Muneshwar, Parashar, M., Srivastava, H.K., Mukesh, A. and Bandyopadhyay, S. Role of inhibitory interneurons in long time scale adaptation based changes in coding of sound sequences in the mouse auditory cortex (ACX), Society for Neuroscience, 2018, San Diego, CA. link
• Mukesh, A., Muneshwar and Bandyopadhyay, S. Deviant selectivity in auditory cortical neurons for stimuli with varying contrast, Association for Research in Otolaryngology, 2022, San Jose, CA. link
• Muneshwar*, Mukesh, A*. and Bandyopadhyay, S. Separate functional subnetworks encode regularity and irregularity of sound sequences within auditory cortex. Society for Neuroscience, 2022, San Diego, CA. (* equal contribution)

Courses taken

• Estimation of signals and systems
• Pattern Recognition and Image Understanding
• Introduction to cognitive information processing
• English for technical writing

Work progress

• Established a theoretical binary framework to show that deviant selectivity is preferred to maximise imformation exchange
• Constructed a rough binary and isofrequency column-based model to demonstrate deviant selectivity in auditory cortex.
• Investigated the role of inhibitory neruons in the encoding of temporal stimulus patterns in the auditory cortex
• Found evidence of contrast selectivity in the neurons of auditory cortex and investigated the role of inhibitory neurons in it.