Welcome!

I'm an MD-PhD student at Harvard and MIT in the Health Sciences & Technology (HST) Track. I work on combining large scale neural activity recordings with methods for sensing and perturbing neuromodulators. Clinically, I currently most interested in neuro-oncology and am looking for opportunities to bring my skillset to the field.

I am currently pursuing my PhD in the Harvey Lab in the Neurobiology department at Harvard Medical School. My project combines calcium imaging with novel neuromodulator sensors and CRISPR to both sense and perturb neuromodulator levels in the brain. I am currently supported by the Harvard Brain Initiative Bipolar Seed Grant.

In 2020-2021, I worked as a data engineer for U19 Team Dope, a cross institutional collaboration developing a unified theory of dopamine in the basal ganglia. I primarily worked in the Datta Lab where I developed methods for quantification of mouse facial expression in collaboration with Richard Hakim (Sabatini Lab) and Alex Williams (Linderman Lab). I also formed the Neurodata Without Borders Complex Behavior working group and built tools to standardize neuroethological data storage.

From 2019-2020, I pursued a Fulbright Research Grant in Barcelona in Karim Lekadir's group at the University of Barcelona. There, I studied how heart and brain structural variation might explain associations between cardiovascular risk and cognitive function in the UK Biobank.

Before the Fulbright, I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford with a BS in Biology with Honors and Distinction in Computational Biology. At Stanford, I started my research career developing models of linguistic disjunction acquisition with Masoud Jasbi in Michael Frank's lab. I completed my main thesis work on radiological image quantification and classification in Sandy Napel's group. I won the Angela Lee Undergraduate Research Award for this work. After my thesis, I worked with Maja Djurisic in the Carla Shatz's lab to study the role of immune molecules in synaptic plasticity and development.

Computational Neuroscience

Spectral envelopes of facial movements predict intention, cortical representations, and neural prosthetic control

Preprint, 2025
Richard Hakim, Akshay Jaggi, Gyuryang Heo, Hideyuki Matsumoto, Naoshige Uchida, Mitsuko Watabe-Uchida, Sandeep Robert Datta, Simon Musall, Bernardo L. Sabatini

[Preprint] [Code]

Medical Imaging

A structural heart-brain axis mediates the association between cardiovascular risk and cognitive function

Imaging Neuroscience, 2024
Akshay Jaggi, Eleanor L.S. Conole, Zahra Raisi-Estabragh, Polyxeni Gkontra, Celeste McCracken, Liliana Szabo, Stefan Neubauer, Steffen E. Petersen, Simon R. Cox, Karim Lekadir

[Paper] [Code]

Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Radiomics Reveal Differential Impact of Sex, Age, and Vascular Risk Factors on Cardiac Structure and Myocardial Tissue

Front. Cardio. Med., 2021
Zahra Raisi-Estabragh*, Akshay Jaggi*, Polyxeni Gkontra, Celeste McCracken, Nay Aung, Patricia Bernadette Munroe, Stefan Neubauer, Nicholas C Harvey, Karim Lekadir, Steffen Erhard Petersen

[Paper]

Quantitative image features from radiomic biopsy differentiate oncocytoma from chromophobe renal cell carcinoma

Journal of Medical Imaging, 2021
Akshay Jaggi, Domenico Mastrodicasa, Gregory W. Charville, R. Brooke Jeffrey, Sandy Napel, Bhavik Patel

[Paper] [Code]

Stanford DRO Toolkit: digital reference objects for standardization of radiomic features

Tomography, 2020
Akshay Jaggi, Sarah A Mattonen, Michael McNitt-Gray, Sandy Napel

[Paper] [Code]

Cognitive Science

Context-Dependent Learning of Linguistic Disjunction

Journal of Child Language, 2022
Masoud Jasbi, Akshay Jaggi, Michael C. Frank

[Paper] [Code]

Conceptual and prosodic cues in child-directed speech can help children learn the meaning of disjunction

CogSci, 2018
Masoud Jasbi, Akshay Jaggi, Michael C. Frank

[Paper] [Code]