Amir Khani
PhD student
amir.khani@donders.ru.nl
I completed my Bachelor's in Computer Science at Amirkabir University of Technology, Iran. During my undergraduate studies, I joined the Genzel Lab as a computational intern, working on theta-gamma coupling during REM sleep in rats and its role in memory consolidation, a project I am continuing into my PhD.
My main PhD project focuses on developing semi-naturalistic habitats for rodents that serve as both a home and an experimental setup. Standard rodent paradigms strip away most of the animal's natural environment in pursuit of experimental control, but this comes at a cost: short test sessions outside the home cage, forced isolation of social animals, and unavoidable human handling have all been shown to confound behavioral and neurophysiological outcomes, and have been identified as central drivers of the reproducibility crisis in rodent research. A semi-naturalistic environment, combined with long-term multi-modal recording for capturing the full repertoire of natural behavior on extended timescales, enables more ecologically valid behavioral experiments and helps address the reproducibility problem in animal-model research, while also improving animal welfare through environmental enrichment.
My project focuses on the hardware and software side of this effort: designing the habitat, integrating multi-modal recording, and building the analysis pipelines needed to make sense of continuous, group-level behavioral data.