(Boston)—Chandramouli (“Chand”) Chandrasekaran, PhD, assistant professor of anatomy & neurobiology at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, and psychological and brain sciences at the University’s College of Arts and Sciences, has received a Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Recipients receive a minimum of $400,000 over a five-year period for research and education.
The award recognizes researchers with the “potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization,” according to the NSF. Researchers are selected from a broad range of fields based on the strength of their innovative research and community service. The NSF's most prestigious award, it supports the early career development activities of teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization.
Using a combination of electrophysiological, behavioral, optogenetic and computational techniques, Chand’s research aims to understand how the brain combines sensory input and context to generate the appropriate action at the right time such as turning left or right at an intersection when the light turns green.
He received his master’s degree in neural and behavioral sciences at the international Max Planck Research School at the University of Tübingen in Germany. As a PhD student studying under Asif Ghazanfar, PhD, at Princeton University, Chand examined how information from visual and auditory cues are combined, a process termed multisensory integration. He was a postdoctoral fellow with the late Krishna Shenoy, PhD, at Stanford University where he developed computational and experimental approaches to understand how the brain makes decisions and controls the movements we make in everyday life.