Sophia Uddin - Science & Medicine


I am currently in my final year of medical school at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. I entered the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) in 2013. 

I received my Ph.D. in computational neuroscience after defending my thesis, Auditory Understanding of Speech and Non-Speech, in April 2018. I studied in Dr. Howard Nusbaum's lab, working at the intersection of computational neuroscience and psychology. To date, my research questions have  broadly concerned mechanisms by which the human brain processes complex and meaningful auditory inputs like language and music. I use behavioral studies, EEG, and fMRI to try to gain insight into the neural mechanisms that allow us to use language and music in our daily lives. In particular, I study how top-down cognitive effects modulate sensory representations.

Learning and memory are also areas of interest for me. Dr. Nusbaum's lab has long been investigating perceptual learning - the process by which we learn to hone our perception of sensory stimuli, like a music student might learn how to tell whether a note is in or out of tune. As learning and sensory processing are profoundly affected by commonplace, deceptively simple processes such as sleep and aging, I am also interested in investigating these processes in the context of my existing work.

While I was working on my Ph.D., I stayed involved in medicine by volunteering at some of the free clinics that Pritzker students help run around the city.
https://pritzker.uchicago.edu/page/bridgeport-free-clinic
http://www.nlvs.org/clinic/faqs.shtml

Before I moved to Chicago, I was a two-time intern with the Diversity Summer Internship Program at Johns Hopkins. While an intern, I studied the autoimmune pathogenesis of Type 1 Diabetes in Dr. Abdel Hamad's lab. After college, I joined Dr. Hamad's lab for two years as a technician before applying to M.D./Ph.D. programs.



Click here to download my CV.