Bio
Biafra Ahanonu, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine. He studies the neural coding and molecular mechanisms that generate specific pain percepts and behaviors via sensorimotor transformations and how the disease or therapies alter the peripheral and central nervous systems.
He is an HHMI Hanna H. Gray Fellow and conducted his postdoctoral work at UCSF under Prof. Allan Basbaum, studying the neural coding of pain in the spinal cord and trigeminal ganglion of behaving animals and molecular properties of pain circuits. As an NSF Graduate and HHMI Gilliam Fellow at Stanford in the Dept. of Biology under Prof. Mark Schnitzer, he studied pain and locomotion/decision-making neural codes in the amygdala and striatum. In parallel, he developed and furthered imaging analysis tools (e.g. CIAtah, https://git.io/ciatah). As an undergraduate at MIT (BSc, Biology and Brain & Cognitive Sciences), he worked in labs in the USA (MIT, HHMI Janelia), Switzerland, Spain, Mexico, and Singapore.
