// People

The team behind the lab's research and clinical work.

Principal investigator, staff, trainees, and alumni. Hover any card to see contact and links — click through for full bios on the longer profile pages.

// Principal investigator · Penn Neurosurgery

Iahn Cajigas, MD, PhD

Dr. Cajigas is a graduate of the joint Harvard–MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, completed neurosurgery residency at the University of Miami / Jackson Memorial Hospital, and a postgraduate fellowship in epilepsy, functional, and stereotactic neurosurgery at the University of California, San Francisco.

His clinical expertise includes deep brain stimulation, focused ultrasound, and stereotactic radiosurgery for movement and psychiatric disorders, the surgical management of epilepsy, the management of refractory back pain with neuromodulation, and the surgical and radiosurgical treatment of trigeminal neuralgia.

Email Penn faculty profile @iahncajigas Google Scholar

// 02 · Staff

Research staff.

Qasim Qureshi

Research Specialist

Lead author on the lab's beta-dynamics work using high-density ECoG arrays during essential-tremor focused-ultrasound and STN-DBS cases.

Pedro Borges

Postdoctoral Researcher

Leveraging brain–computer interfaces and electrophysiological insight to unlock new treatments for patients with neurological disorders.

Tom Pisano, MD, PhD

Incoming Postdoc · 2027

Joining the lab in 2027 from a fellowship in computational neuroscience.

Jarl Haggerty

Software Engineer

Building Thalamus, a multimodal high-throughput and high-precision tool for behavioral experiments and data acquisition, and the infrastructure to ingest and analyze the data generated by Thalamus.

// 03 · PhD & MD-PhD students

Graduate students.

Krishna Sargur

PhD Student · Penn BE

How the motor cortex encodes information related to continuous finger movements, and how to extract decodable features from high-density ECoG arrays.

Bowen Wang

M.S.E. → Emory PhD

Thesis on single-hemisphere bimanual decoding for motor BCIs. Matriculating in the Emory Neuroscience PhD program in Fall 2026.

Min Jae Kim

MD-PhD Candidate

Network-level mechanisms linking deep brain stimulation to cortical physiology in movement disorders. 2024 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow for New Americans.

Kamren Khan

MD-PhD Candidate

Inhibitory control of neural population dynamics in the basal ganglia. 2026 Parkinson's Foundation Summer Student Fellowship and Guggenheim Family Neurosurgery Scholarship recipient.

// 04 · Medical students

Medical students.

Pierce Davis

Medical Student

Developing a neuroimaging pipeline to allow for anatomic localization of high-density cortical surface electrode arrays.

Ellie Gabriel

Medical Student

Investigates motor cortical dynamics through deep learning–based ECoG decoding.

// 05 · Undergraduate researchers

Undergraduates.

Kyunghwan Lim

Undergraduate Researcher

Deep learning and network-science paradigms for neural decoding. Spending Summer 2026 in the Hermes/Miller Lab at Mayo Clinic.

Aidan Gor

Undergraduate Researcher

Joined the lab in 2026; research focus area in development.

// 06 · Alumni

Alumni.

Trainees who have moved on from the lab. Where they went next is a useful signal for prospective applicants of where this work can take you.

Jerry Cai

Penn Neuro · 2024

Honors thesis on calibration protocols for optical trackers used in intraoperative motion capture. Now: Co-founder & COO at Agorum, New York.

Jack Sylvester

Penn · 2023–24

Worked on the BCI decoding pipeline. Now: Quality Engineer (medical devices) at Abbott, Minneapolis, MN.

Yuanchao Zhang

Penn MSE · 2025

Master's thesis on dynamic mode decomposition for neural and kinematic signals. Co-supervised by Iahn Cajigas and Pratik Chaudhari (Penn CIS).