Rate My Professor Sujith Vijayan

Vijayan’s academic interests encompass computational modeling of brain oscillatory dynamics in health and disease, brain-machine interfaces, sleep and memory consolidation, emotional regulation, learning and memory, mental imagery, sleep and epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, and PTSD. In 2022, he received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award worth $696,000 to study neural dynamics during sleep and their enhancement of learning for brain-computer interface tasks, exploring auditory stimulation to accelerate learning in individuals with neuromuscular disorders such as ALS, spinal cord injury, or stroke. Notable publications include "Frontal beta-theta network during REM sleep" (2017), "Multitaper estimates of phase-amplitude coupling" (Lepage et al., 2021), "Unsupervised Multitaper Spectral Method for Identifying REM Sleep in Patients with Epilepsy" (Lepage et al., 2023), and "Emotional Memory Processing during REM Sleep with Auditory Stimulation in Humans" (Rho et al., Journal of Neuroscience, 2023). His biophysical models of the sleeping brain have illuminated mechanisms underlying recurrent nightmares in PTSD patients, paving the way for interventions that manipulate brain rhythms during sleep to restore restorative sleep functions and improve emotional processing.