I am currently a research associate at Boston University working on two projects to investigate meditation from a neuroscientific perspective.

The first one is a multisite project on the neuroscience of meditation and mind-body health (the Compassion and Attention Longitudinal Meditation (CALM) study), a collaboration between Emory University, University of Arizona, Boston University, and the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)-Harvard-MIT Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging.

The second project is an exploration of the neural and physiological correlates of more advanced forms of meditation practice which may enable top-down regulation of homeostasis mechanisms classically considered to be beyond voluntary control.

These two projects are funded by the NIH (NCCAM) with a Research Challenge grant, one of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Awards (PI: Eric Schwartz), and by a Varela Award from the Mind and Life Institute.

• About the CALM study: Chuck Raison (2-min video)
• About compassion meditation: Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi (4-min video), Matthieu Ricard (10-min video)
• Conference on Compassion Meditation: Mapping current Research and Charting Future Directions (Oct 2010, Atlanta, GA); with the Dalai Lama, Matthieu Ricard, Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi, Chuck Raison, Richie Davidson, and other scientists and scholars. Full video: Part 1 (1.5hr), Part 2 (2hrs)

I was previously a postdoctoral fellow in Garrett Stanley's group, at Harvard University and then at Georgia Tech (in Atlanta). My work was on neuronal population coding in the early visual pathway. I showed that the temporal scale of the population code entering visual cortex is on the order of 10 ms and is largely insensitive to changes in visual contrast (Desbordes et al., 2008). I then found that fine spike timing precision—within single cells as well as across nearby neurons in the local population—was continually modulated as the visual stimulus unfolds, and that this modulation could be captured by a generalized linear model (GLM) that combines stimulus-driven elements with spike-history dependence associated with intrinsic cellular dynamics (Desbordes et al., 2010). See my Research Interests for more details.