Human single-neuron recordings reveal population coding of attentional dynamics during naturalistic movie viewing
Cerquetella, C., Qasim, S.E.
bioRxiv, 2026
What makes memories sticky?
We study the mental computations that encode, strengthen, and retrieve memories — and how those processes fail in memory loss and mental health disorders.
Questions
What drives our science
Three questions that orient every project in the lab.
How do memories stick?
We probe the mental computations that encode and strengthen lasting memories...
Why do some memories fade?
...so we can understand why memories sometime fade in aging and dementia...
How can memory go awry?
...and so we can understand why memories sometimes go awry in mental health disorders.
Research
What we study
Our lab investigates the neural computations that make memories persist, and what happens when those mechanisms fail in memory loss and psychiatric illness.
Affiliations
Where we sit
The Qasim Lab is based at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and connected across campus.
Publications
Recent publications
Selected papers from the lab.
Hippocampal-cingulate dynamics in the human brain link reinforcement-learning and memory
Qasim, S.E., Panov, F., Nunez, L.M., Rhone, A.E., Kawasaki, H., Kovach, C., Garcia, C., Dlouhy, B., Gu, X., Saez, I.
bioRxiv, 2026
Evaluating place cell detection methods in rats and humans: implications for cross-species spatial coding
Zhang, W., Donoghue, T., Qasim, S.E., Jacobs, J.
PLOS Computational Biology (in press), 2026
People
Meet the lab
Researchers studying memory persistence and mental health at Rutgers.
Salman E. Qasim, Ph.D.
PI
Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and Core Faculty at the Rutgers Brain Health Institute. PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Columbia University; postdoctoral training in Computational Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai. His research unearths the unique features of human neural computations that enable high-level cognitive functions.
salman.qasim@rutgers.edu
Lauren Carrillo
Master's Student
Master's Candidate in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rutgers University. B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Washington. Her research interests include understanding and developing methods for neuromodulation of pathological neural activity, with an emphasis on epilepsy and neurotechnology.
Zain Soomro
Undergraduate
Undergraduate student at Rutgers University pursuing a B.S. in Computer Science. His research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, neuroscience, and medicine, with a focus on applying computational methods to better understand neural activity. At the Qasim Lab, he is working on developing automated pipelines to detect and classify high-frequency oscillations in intracranial EEG recordings.
News
Lab updates
Brief notes from the lab.
- American Epilepsy Society Early Career Award Dr. Qasim receives the AES Early Career Award for 2026–2027.
- Welcome postdoctoral fellows Dr. Marco Lai and Dr. Carlo Cerquetella join the Qasim Lab as postdoctoral fellows.
- Qasim Lab opens at Rutgers The Qasim Lab begins at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and the Rutgers Brain Health Institute.
- Positive affect and memory paper published New work in Communications Psychology shows how positive affect modulates reward-driven memory.
Join the lab
We are always looking for curious, motivated researchers to join our team. Explore open positions and learn how to apply.