University of Trento

Post-Doc, CIMEC (Center for Mind/Brain Sciences

Other Affiliations: University of Hyderabad, Computer and Information Sciences
IIT Gandhinagar, Cognitive Science
University of Cambridge, Physiology, Development and Neuroscience

Post-doctoral Fellow

About

Krishna Prasad Miyapuram is a Post-doctoral researcher at Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento. Recently, Krishna worked in Industry (Unilever R&D)  as a Cognitive neuroscientist in the Netherlands. He has over 8 years of research experience in neuroimaging with functional MRI (predoctoral+doctoral). Krishna has PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from University of Cambridge, U.K. supported by prestigious Cambridge Nehru Fellowship,one among 8 fellowships awarded across all disciplines nation-wide (India) and UK research award for overseas students with excellent potential for research.  Dr. Miyapuram has a truly multidisciplinary background. He has two masters degrees in electronics and artificial intelligence. As a visiting researcher at ATR computational neuroscience laboratories, Kyoto, Japan, Krishna (or Prasad san, as called in Japan) was inspired into neuroscience research and the exciting world of studying human brain function in vivo non-invasively using fMRI. He has been then through a journey of extensive self study studying neuroanatomy and statistical parametric mapping. Particularly, students from India typically choose to study either biology or mathematics during their pre-university education (class 11). After the current research assignment at Trento, Dr. Krishna Miyapuram will be joining the Indian Institute of Technology, IIT Gandhinagar (Gujarat, India) as a faculty member in Psychology and Computer Science.

Research: His PhD thesis was on studying the neural activations pertaining to stimuli predicting reward. His doctoral work extended the findings of sensory imagery into the reward domain  and at the same time addressed two key methodological issues. The first was on the efficacy of visually presenting hypothetical monetary rewards to human participants in an fMRI scanner.  The second was recovering signal dropouts from the orbitofrontal cortex due to air-tissue interface above the eye orbit. His predoctoral research was  on visuo-motor sequence learning. The main hypothesis was that during motor skill learning we transition from an early phase to an automatic phase, which are supported by distinct cortico-sub cortical loops. The publication in neuroimage journal was awarded editors' choice award for the year 2006.

Brief CV:
2011 - Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Italy
2008 - 2011, Cognitive Psychologist/Neuroscientist, Unilever R&D, The Netherlands
2004 - 2008, Ph.D. Cognitive Neuroscience, fMRI of reward processing, University of Cambridge, UK
2002 - 2004, M.Tech. Artificial Intelligence, University of Hyderabad, India
2000 - 2002/4, Research Assistant, Indo-Japanese Project, fMRI of visuomotor sequence learning
2000 & 2003, Visiting Researcher, Advanced Telecommunications Research International, Kyoto, Japan
1998 - 2000, M.Sc. Electronics, University of Hyderabad, India
1999 - Summer Student, Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, India

Contact Information