Kushaan Gupta

I am a graduate student @ Euston Lab in Canadian Centre for Behavioral Neuroscience (CCBN), University of Lethbridge currently investigating the memory-guided decision making dynamics within the medial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus through descriptive modeling of neural electrophysiology and normative modeling employing deep reinforcement learning.

As a transdisciplinary neuroscientist in the making, I’m deeply interested in all aspects of brain sciences, particularly abstract representational learning and decision making.

I was previously a Post Baccalaureate Research Assistant at Swanand lab in Centre for Neuroscience, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore working on quantifying plasticity of astrocytes due to stress and its pharmacological treatment through bioimage analysis. Prior to this, I pursued my undergraduate studies in Computer Engineering at Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya, Indore.

news

Jul 28, 2023	Concluded TAing for NMA-CN 2023
May 1, 2022	Started in University of Lethbridge
May 1, 2022	Moved to Lethbridge AB, Canada

latest posts

May 22, 2021	a distill-style blog post

selected publications

2021

J. Cell Sci.

Automated morphometric analysis with SMorph software reveals plasticity induced by antidepressant therapy in hippocampal astrocytes

Parul Sethi, Kushaan Gupta, Garima Virmani, Surya Chandra Rao Thumu, Narendrakumar Ramanan, and Swananda Marathe

Journal of Cell Science, Jun 2021

jcs258430

Abs HTML PDF Blog Code

Nervous system development and plasticity involve changes in cellular morphology, making morphological analysis a valuable exercise in the study of nervous system development, function and disease. Morphological analysis is a time-consuming exercise requiring meticulous manual tracing of cellular contours and extensions. We have developed a software tool, called SMorph, to rapidly analyze the morphology of cells of the nervous system. SMorph performs completely automated Sholl analysis. It extracts 23 morphometric features based on cell images and Sholl analysis parameters, followed by principal component analysis (PCA). SMorph was tested on neurons, astrocytes and microglia and reveals subtle changes in cell morphology. Using SMorph, we found that chronic 21-day treatment with the antidepressant desipramine results in a significant structural remodeling in hippocampal astrocytes in mice. Given the proposed involvement of astroglial structural changes and atrophy in major depression in humans, our results reveal a novel kind of structural plasticity induced by chronic antidepressant administration.