Kohleman N. Swift

Kohleman Swift is a graduate student in medical engineering and medical physics investigating synaptic plasticity and its role in memory formation and epilepsy. Traditional electrophysiology is invasive and limited in scope; he develops optical brain-machine interfaces combining genetically encoded voltage indicators, optogenetics, and holography to enable longitudinal measurement of synaptic strength changes in behaving animals. He has built robust analytical pipelines to process high-speed voltage imaging data (>1 kHz sampling rates), implementing motion correction, membrane segmentation, signal extraction, and spike detection. He uses deep learning and parallel computing methods to develop neural network-based denoising modules and accelerate processing of complex optical datasets. As a MathWorks Fellow, Kohleman will expand these tools to enable high-throughput measurement of synaptic connectivity across neuronal populations and test whether endocannabinoid signaling modulation could attenuate maladaptive remodeling in epilepsy. This integrated optical-computational approach could open new avenues for investigating synaptic dysfunction, advancing our understanding of neurological disease.