Michael Kahana, PhD, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Psychology at theUniversity of Pennsylvania; CEO at nia Therapeutics
About: Michael Kahana is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. For three decades, he has studied human memory and its neural basis using behavioral, computational, and electrophysiological methods. Kahana is the author of more than 230 peer-reviewed journal articles, co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Memory, and author of “Foundations of Human Memory,” also published by Oxford University Press.
In 2002, Kahana and his then-graduate student, Marc Howard, published their retrieved-context theory of episodic memory, which has become one of the most widely cited and actively developed theories of memory. Kahana and his early trainees, including Dan Rizzuto, pioneered the study of human memory electrophysiology in neurosurgical patients undergoing invasive electrode monitoring. This work identified and characterized the functional role of theta oscillations in the human brain. Kahana and his students discovered and documented the properties of place cells, grid cells, goal cells and most recently time cells using single unit recording methods in collaboration with Dr. Itzhak Fried of UCLA. Kahana’s group also used the high spatial and temporal resolution of direct brain recordings to identify patterns of brain network activity underlying successful memory encoding, retrieval, and reinstatement.
Seeking to apply his basic research to the treatment of memory loss, Kahana and Nia Therapeutics co-founder, Dr. Dan Rizzuto, embarked on an ambitious program to build the world’s largest dataset examining the effect of electrical stimulation on memory and its neural correlates. This $30M project, funded under the cross-agency Human Brain Initiative, led to numerous discoveries about the neural basis of human memory and the use of neuromodulation to manipulate memory function in the brain.
Kahana is presently on leave from the University of Pennsylvania, working at Nia Therapeutics. His goal is to initiate a feasibility study to evaluate the safety and efficacy of AI-guided closed-loop neurostimulation for treating memory loss in patients with traumatic brain injury.
Kahana has received several major awards for his research, including the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the inaugural Mid-Career Award from the Psychonomic Society, the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Grossman Award from the Society of Neurological Surgeons.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-kahana-406642111/
- Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=i1KamSEAAAAJ&hl=en