Asohan Amarasingham
- Position
- Professor
- aamarasingham@ccny.cuny.edu
- Office
- MR 209B
- Office hours
- Please contact by email for an appointment
- Office phone
- (212) 650-5112
Biography
As an undergraduate at Virginia (B.Sc., Mathematics & Cognitive Science, 1997), influenced by Chip Levy, I developed an interest in the mathematical and statistical foundations of emerging branches of the neural and cognitive sciences. I completed graduate study at Brown (M.Sc., Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences, 1999; Ph.D., Applied Mathematics, 2004), where I worked in the Pattern Theory group and wrote a dissertation under the supervision of Stuart Geman, on statistical topics in neurophysiology. Following a period of teaching mathematics at the University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, I completed my postdoctoral training in the laboratory of hippocampal neurophysiologist György Buzsáki at Rutgers. I joined the faculty at City College and the Graduate Center in 2010-11. Currently, my research interests span topics in statistics as well as neural coding and computation, with an emphasis on questions raised by large-scale neurophysiological measurements, and their implications for our understanding of the dynamics and functional properties of neuronal circuits.
Selected publications and software
J. Platkiewicz, Z. Saccomano, S. Mckenzie, D. English, A. Amarasingham."Monosynaptic inference via finely-timed spikes." J. Computational Neuroscience, 2021.
J. Platkiewicz, E. Stark, and A. Amarasingham. (2017) "Spike-centered jitter can mistake temporal structure." Neural Computation. 29:783-803.
A. Amarasingham, S. Geman, and M. Harrison. (2015) "Ambiguity and nonidentifiability in the statistical analysis of neural codes." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 112:6455-6460.
M. Harrison, A. Amarasingham, and W. Truccolo. (2015) "Spatiotemporal conditional inference and hypothesis tests for neural ensemble spiking precision." Neural Computation. 27:104-150.
A. Amarasingham, M. Harrison, N. Hatsopoulos, and S. Geman. (2012) "Conditional modeling and the jitter method of spike resampling." Journal of Neurophysiology. (Here is the supporting tech report).
S. Fujisawa, A. Amarasingham, M. Harrison, and G. Buzsaki. (2008) "Behavior-dependent short-term assembly dynamics in the medial prefrontal cortex." Nature Neuroscience. 11:823-833.
E. Pastalkova, V. Itskov, A. Amarasingham, and G. Buzsaki. (2008) "Internally-generated cell assembly sequences in the rat hippocampus." Science. 321:1322-1327
A. Amarasingham, T.-L. Chen, S. Geman, M. Harrison, and D. Sheinberg. (2006) "Spike count reliability and the Poisson hypothesis." Journal of Neuroscience. 26:801-809 [software]
