Warsha Barde

LIFE Fellow since 2021, Deutsches Zentrum für Neurodegenerative Erkrankungen e.V. (DZNE), Dresden

I am a doctoral student at DZNE, Dresden. My research interests lie in understanding the neural mechanisms of hippocampal cognitive processes like learning and memory, spatial navigation, decision-making, etc. — how they evolve over the human lifespan and how they are compromised during healthy aging, Alzheimer’s, and other neurological disorders. Under the supervision of Gerd Kempermann, I am studying the neurobiology of individuality; and how environmental enrichment and adult hippocampal neurogenesis contribute towards the emergence of individual traits.
In 2015, I received my Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology from the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, India. I then moved to the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru for my Master’s degree in Neuroscience (2020). Here, under the supervision of Sachin Deshmukh, I studied hippocampal place cells and grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex (mEC) that are the key components of the spatial navigation system and investigated how their spatial representation is influenced by features like scale and boundaries of the environment.

Dissertation project:

The role of learning in the emergence of individuality

Publications

Saxena, R., Barde, W., & Deshmukh, S. S. (2018). Inexpensive, scalable camera system for tracking rats in large spaces. Journal of Neurophysiology, 120(5), 2383–2395. https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.00215.2018