Dr. Adithya Sarma
Post Doc
adithya.sarma@donders.ru.nl
I completed my bachelors in Life Sciences at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and masters in Neurosciences at the University of Groningen. I then pursued my PhD at Groningen, where I developed a paradigm to study multiple long-term social memories in mice and found that sleep deprivation disrupts their retrieval. Using optogenetic and pharmacological interventions, we restored access to these memories enabling previously sleep-deprived mice to retrieve and discriminate multiple social experiences. In parallel, I built a semi-automated tracking system to study how social interactions affect sleep in Drosophila, revealing a novel class of wake-inducing interactions where flies actively wake each other.
Since July 2025, I have been a postdoctoral researcher in the Genzel lab, where we study how the cortex acquires semantic memories in multi-trial learning paradigms such as the object space task. We combine this with activity-dependent neuronal tagging, chemogenetics, and immunofluorescence to identify and manipulate engrams, mapping how memory networks across the brain support the formation and retrieval of semantic memories.