News
2026
We are excited to celebrate more than one year since INSPIRE Lab launched in January 2025! Over the past year and a half, our lab has grown from its early foundation into a vibrant research group. We are grateful to our alumni, Mike DellaFera, Ali Fayyaz, Nida Shah, Artur Alsina, Archana Sathiyamoorthy, Catherine Smith, Hernan Gonzalez, Nurahmed Multezem, Olaniyi Salami, and Matthew Wang, for their contributions and wish them the very best in their next chapters. We are also delighted to welcome new members, Gabriela Poulose, Vishal Senthilkumar, Nghia Truong, David Simberg, Zuzana Lucy, and Noah Hill, to INSPIRE Lab. We are excited to share several recent updates: INSPIRE Lab is proud to contribute to computational brain research as part of the University of Maryland Grand Challenges Impact Award, Predictive Biology Hub for Human and Environmental Health. Congratulations to Archana, whose paper was selected for an oral presentation at the 2026 Northeast Bioengineering Conference! Congratulations to Jianan, whose paper was selected for an oral presentation at the 2026 IEEE EMBC in Toronto! We are also proud to celebrate INSPIRE Lab’s first appearance at OHBM 2026 in Bordeaux, France. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to INSPIRE Lab’s growth. We look forward to continued discovery and new milestones ahead.
Thank you to UMD’s Brain & Behavior Institute for supporting our work with a seed grant. In collaboration with Dr. Nicolas Francis, the grant will fund our project on Stimulus and State-Dependence of Brain Network Dynamics During Psilocybin Treatment in Mice.
Congratulations to Dr. Nan Xu on being nominated to and inducted into the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society. Sigma Xi was founded in 1886 at Cornell University, Dr. Xu’s alma mater, and is an international honor society for scientists and engineers.
2025
We would like to thank the NIH BRAIN Initiative for supporting our research with the R00 Pathway to Independence Award!
We are excited to welcome four new lab members that have joined us with the new semester! Junhao and Nida have joined the INSPIRE Lab as PhD students in Artificial Intelligence and Bioengineering, respectively. Catherine (Biocomputational Engineering) and Nurahmed (Computer Engineering) have joined the lab as undergraduate researchers. We look forward to working with them!
We are pleased to welcome Dr. Linnea Hoheisel and Dr. Jianan Jian to our lab as postdoctoral researchers. Linnea’s work focuses on brain network dynamics, while Jianan is interested in exploring brain connectivity through neuroimaging techniques.
We are excited to welcome the first cohort of lab members joining us! Mike (Physiology and Neurobiology, Psychology) is our new lab manager, Nirmal (Computer Science, Mathematics) is our new research technician, and Olaniyi (Computer Science, Mathematics), Matthew (Computer Science), Ben (Computer Science), and Archana (Psychology, Criminology & Criminal Justice) are our new undergraduate researchers. We look forward to achieving great things together!
2024
INSPIRE Lab is launching at UMD College Park! We have multiple openings for motivated young minds!