Honors & Awards

  • Neurotech Fellowship Trainee, Center of Mind, Brain, Computation, and Technology (2023)
  • NSF Graduate Fellowship, National Science Foundation (2022)
  • Goldwater Scholarship, The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation (2021)

Education & Certifications

  • M.S., Stanford University, Electrical Engineering (2025)
  • B.S., University of Florida, Mathematics (2022)

Contact

  • Academic
    University - Student Department: Electrical Engineering Position: Graduate

Additional Info

Links

Current Research and Scholarly Interests

I have always been fascinated by how interactions that occur at the smallest scale can create the large-scale systems that we observe in our daily lives. This is especially important in neuroscience today, as advances in technology allow us to record in vivo activity of neuronal networks, and combine cellular and systems level views of the brain. I am interested in studying how phenomena in systems neuroscience, particularly the generation of movement, arises from interactions at the neuronal level. I strongly believe that mathematics is the proper language to describe relationships that transcend scales. My research interests are highly inter-disciplinary and lay at the intersection of mathematics, computation, neuroscience, and engineering.

I am currently a member of the Brain Interfacing Lab and am pursuing research that harnesses dynamical systems theory to model how spiking activity in recorded motor cortical neurons yields motor control. On the theoretical side, my research involves developing new mathematical frameworks for analyzing neural data and modeling relationships between neurons and behavior. This ties into my computational work, which involves building pipelines for processing large sets of neural data, and utilizing tools from machine learning, optimization, and statistical signal processing to apply theoretical frameworks to real-world data. I engage in experimental research and help design paradigms for testing novel hypotheses about the nature of motor control. Finally, as an engineer, I also design systems for interfacing with hardware, and ultimately improving brain-machine interfaces. By combining theory, computation, experiments, and engineering, I hope to test and better understand how the brain works.

Lab Affiliations

All Publications

  • Dynamics of ramping bursts in a respiratory neuron model JOURNAL OF COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE Abdulla, M. U., Phillips, R. S., Rubin, J. E. 2022; 50 (2): 161-180

    Abstract

    Intensive computational and theoretical work has led to the development of multiple mathematical models for bursting in respiratory neurons in the pre-Bötzinger Complex (pre-BötC) of the mammalian brainstem. Nonetheless, these previous models have not captured the pre-inspiratory ramping aspects of these neurons' activity patterns, in which relatively slow tonic spiking gradually progresses to faster spiking and a full-blown burst, with a corresponding gradual development of an underlying plateau potential. In this work, we show that the incorporation of the dynamics of the extracellular potassium ion concentration into an existing model for pre-BötC neuron bursting, along with some parameter adjustments, suffices to induce this ramping behavior. Using fast-slow decomposition, we show that this activity can be considered as a form of parabolic bursting, but with burst termination at a homoclinic bifurcation rather than as a SNIC bifurcation. We also investigate the parameter-dependence of these solutions and show that the proposed model yields a greater dynamic range of burst frequencies, durations, and duty cycles than those produced by other models in the literature.

    View details for DOI 10.1007/s10827-021-00800-w

    View details for Web of Science ID 000711315300001

    View details for PubMedID 34704174

  • Classification of the Second Minimal Orbits in the Sharkovski Ordering AXIOMS Abdulla, U. G., Iqbal, N. H., Abdulla, M. U., Abdulla, R. U. 2025; 14 (3)

    View details for DOI 10.3390/axioms14030222

    View details for Web of Science ID 001454210400001

  • Second Minimal Orbits, Sharkovski Ordering and Universality in Chaos INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BIFURCATION AND CHAOS Abdulla, U. G., Abdulla, R. U., Abdulla, M. U., Iqbal, N. H. 2017; 27 (5)

    View details for DOI 10.1142/S021812741730018X

    View details for Web of Science ID 000403421500002

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0881-7272