Rate My Professor Sujith Vijayan

Sujith Vijayan is an Associate Professor in the School of Neuroscience at Virginia Tech, within the College of Science. He holds a B.A. in Cognitive Science and Psychology from Amherst College, an M.A. in Mathematics from Boston University, and a Ph.D. in Neurobiology from Harvard University. Before his appointment as Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech in 2018, Vijayan served as Research Assistant Professor at Boston University. As Principal Investigator of the Neural Dynamics and Neural Engineering Lab, he leads research employing signal processing techniques, computational modeling, and invasive as well as non-invasive methods to record neural activity. His investigations center on neural dynamics during active behavior and sleep, with applications to memory instantiation, learning in brain-machine interface tasks, improvement of BMI algorithms, and development of stimulation and pharmacological therapies for conditions characterized by abnormal neural dynamics during sleep, including post-traumatic stress disorder and Parkinson’s disease.

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.