Cohort 
2022

Anusha Yasoda-Mohan, PhD

Neuroscientist

Collaboration is key—coming together as a society and placing our trust in the unison of expertise and experience is crucial in addressing dementia.

Current Work

Anusha is a postdoctoral research associate at the School of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin, funded by the Irish Research Council to investigate the mechanism of action of tinnitus (continuous phantom ringing in the ears). Tinnitus shares two of its major risk factors—hearing loss and stress—with dementia and cognitive decline, increasing the necessity to understand tinnitus mechanism. Anusha's current work therefore delves into unravelling the mechanism of action of tinnitus and identifying an objective marker using neuroimaging techniques such as resting-state and task-based EEG.

Personal Hero

My Mother

Words of Strength

Empathy, unconventional thinking, dreaming big, networking

Vision

Collaboration is key—coming together as a society, opening our hearts to seeing the value each of its members bring to the whole and placing our trust in the unison of expertise and experience is crucial in addressing dementia.

Strategy

Anusha is currently developing a co-creative tool called BrainFM in collaboration with a dance artist and Atlantic Fellow. Together they actively engage the audience in topics related to brain health through movement-based translation of didactic content.

Impact

Anusha aims to develop an international community advocating for brain health literacy through the transdisciplinary collaboration of arts and science. She believes the fellowship at the Global Brain Health Institute will also be a stepping stone to developing art-based interventions.

Motivation

Bringing together the science and the arts in increasing awareness about the functioning of the brain, dementia and its risk factors, Anusha aims to bridge the gap in brain health literacy in India and around the world.

Education & Experience

Anusha is a perceptual neuroscientist who is fascinated with how the brain perceives the world. She holds a bachelor’s and masters’ degree in Biomedical Engineering from SSN College of Engineering and the University of South Florida respectively and a PhD in Communication Sciences and Disorders from the University of Texas at Dallas. Anusha is also a trained Indian classical dancer who schooled under the tutelage of Smt. Sheela Unnikrishnan of SriDevi Nrithyala, India. Therefore, in addition to pursuing a career in experimental neuroscience, Anusha is deeply passionate about the arts and its transdisciplinary collaboration with the sciences. To realize this, she co-founded BrainFM - an educational tool that aims to increase awareness about complex neuroscience topics and brain health literacy together with a dance artist.

University of Texas at Dallas
Communication Sciences and Disorders
PhD
University of South Florida
Biomedical Engineering
Master's degree
SSN College of Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
Bachelor’s degree

Awards & Honors

Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship
Causally investigating the dimensional variability in tinnitus as an imbalance between top-down and bottom-up neural processes
2022-2022
Principal Investigator
Trinity College Dublin START
BrainFM – an educational tool to communicate neuroscience through dance
2021
Co-Facilitator
Royal Irish Academy Charlemont Grant
Restoring balance between top-down and bottom-up neural pathways
2021
Principal Investigator
School of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin
Investigating functional changes in the brain to intermittently induced auditory illusions and its relevance to chronic tinnitus
2020
Publication Prize
11th Annual Tinnitus Research Initiative Meeting
Distress-dependent temporal binding of regions encoding disorder-specific and disorder-general behavioral manifestations of phantom percepts
2018
Best Poster (understanding tinnitus mechanism)
Department of Biomedical Engineering, SSN College of Engineering
Bluetooth enabled navigation assist device for the blind
2012
Best Team
National Conference on Assistive Technology, Sri Vishnu Educational Society & UMass Lowell
Design and simulation of demand type pacemaker using LabVIEW
2011
Best Paper

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