Indie Garwood

Indie Garwood is a PhD candidate whose interdisciplinary research lies at the intersection of neuroscience, signal processing, and technology development. Her current work centers on ketamine, a drug used to produce altered states of consciousness and analgesia, which has recently been shown to be a highly effective treatment for chronic depression and seizures. Through her MathWorks Fellowship, Indie will advance MATLAB neural data analysis methods to investigate the mechanisms underlying altered consciousness. Specifically, she will use fiber- based neurotechnology in non-human primates to study the mechanisms behind altered brain states during ketamine anesthesia. Through prior work drawing on MATLAB, Indie has already made important contributions to neural signal processing and neurotechnology development and set the stage for her current research. She will be testing the hypothesis that increased cortical acetylcholine release caused by ketamine facilitates cortical disinhibition, which manifests as bursts of high frequency neural activity during ketamine anesthesia. This research, in combination with Indie’s past innovations, is leading the way to significant new insights into the neuroscience of ketamine and cortical function.