Education:
Bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering from BITS, Pilani.|Ph.D from National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore |Postdoctoral research at Allison Doupe| University of California, San Francisco.
Fellowship Type:
Ramalingaswami Fellow, DBT
Research:
The primary goal of our lab is to understand how neural activity generates the rich variety of behaviors seen in animals. As we are specifically interested in complex learned behaviors, we use the zebra finch, a songbird as our experimental model system.|Advantages of songbirds as a model system|The song of an adult zebra finch is a stereotyped sequence of vocalizations that is an example of a complex behavior that is learned in two stages. In the first stage, young birds memorize the song of an adult tutor bird. In the second stage, they proceed to change their own immature vocalizations to match the memorized tutor song. Similar to human speech learning| song learning is also strongly dependent on intact hearing during both stages. Initially, it is required to successfully memorize the tutor song. Later, young birds need intact hearing to compare their vocalizations to the memorized tutor song in order to determine the changes required to produce a good copy of the tutor song. Earlier research has uncovered the presence of discrete brain regions involved in learning and production of song. These areas seem to be dedicated for song learning and production. The combination of the readily quantifiable song behavior and dedicated brain regions for learning and production of song, make songbirds an excellent model system for studying how the brain learns to produce complex learned behaviors.
List of Publications:
Mimi H Kao*, Raghav Rajan* and Allison J Doupe. Social cues can acutely reverse injury-induced vocal motor impairments (manuscript in preparation)(*Authors contributed equally to the work)|Sarah C Woolley, Raghav Rajan, Mati Joshua and Allison J Doupe. Emergence of context-dependent variability across a basal ganglia network. Neuron 2014 Apr 2; 82(1):208-223. (link)|Raghav Rajan# and Allison J Doupe. Behavioral and neural signatures of readiness to initiate a learned motor sequence. Current Biology 2013 Jan 7; 23(1):87-93.(# corresponding author) (pdf):|Raghav Rajan, James Premdoss Clement and Upinder Singh Bhalla. Rats smell in stereo. Science 2006 Feb 3;311(5761):666-70. (pdf)
Email:
raghav(AT)iiserpune.ac.in
