// People

The team behind the lab's research and clinical work.

Principal investigator, staff, trainees, and alumni. Hover any card to see contact and links — click through for full bios on the longer profile pages.

// Principal investigator · Penn Neurosurgery

Iahn Cajigas, MD, PhD

Dr. Cajigas trained in the joint Harvard–MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. He did his neurosurgery residency at the University of Miami and Jackson Memorial Hospital, then further training in epilepsy and stereotactic neurosurgery at the University of California, San Francisco.

He treats movement and psychiatric disorders with deep brain stimulation, focused ultrasound and targeted radiation. He also operates for epilepsy, uses implanted devices for back pain that has not responded to other treatment, and treats facial nerve pain.

Email Penn faculty profile News RSS feed @iahncajigas Google Scholar

For the clinical team you'll work with at appointments and in the OR — nurse practitioners, our surgical scheduler, and clinical nursing staff — see the For Patients page.

// 02 · Staff

Research staff.

Qasim Qureshi

Research Specialist

Leads our work on a brain rhythm called beta, recorded with fine-grained electrode arrays during tremor and Parkinson's procedures.

Pedro Borges

Postdoctoral Researcher

Uses brain–computer interfaces and brain recordings to look for new treatments for neurological conditions.

Tom Pisano, MD, PhD

Incoming Postdoc · 2027

Joining the lab in 2027 from a fellowship in computational neuroscience.

Jarl Haggerty

Software Engineer

Builds Thalamus, the software that records many streams of data at once during experiments, and the systems that store and analyse what it collects.

// 03 · PhD & MD-PhD students

Graduate students.

Krishna Sargur

PhD Student · Penn BE

How the movement part of the brain represents finger motion, and how to pull useful signals out of fine-grained electrode arrays.

Bowen Wang

M.S.E. → Emory PhD

Thesis on single-hemisphere bimanual decoding for motor BCIs. Matriculating in the Emory Neuroscience PhD program in Fall 2026.

Min Jae Kim

MD-PhD Candidate

How deep brain stimulation changes activity across brain networks in movement disorders. 2024 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow for New Americans.

Kamren Khan

MD-PhD Candidate

How groups of cells deep in the brain hold movement in check. 2026 Parkinson's Foundation Summer Student Fellowship and Guggenheim Family Neurosurgery Scholarship recipient.

// 04 · Medical students

Medical students.

Pierce Davis

Medical Student

Building a scan-based method for working out exactly where each electrode sits on the brain.

Ellie Gabriel

Medical Student

Studies movement signals in the brain using machine learning.

// 05 · Undergraduate researchers

Undergraduates.

Kyunghwan Lim

Undergraduate Researcher

Machine learning and network science, applied to reading brain signals. Spending Summer 2026 in the Hermes/Miller Lab at Mayo Clinic.

Aidan Gor

Undergraduate Researcher

Joined the lab in 2026; research focus area in development.

Malcolm Greenstein

Undergraduate Researcher

Investigating high-frequency neural signatures in surface ECoG signals for motor brain–computer interfaces, with a focus on characterizing spike-like broadband activity.

// 06 · Alumni

Alumni.

Trainees who have moved on. Where they went next shows applicants where this work can lead.

Jerry Cai

Penn Neuro · 2024

Honours thesis on how to calibrate the optical trackers used to capture movement during surgery. Now: Co-founder & COO at Agorum, New York.

Jack Sylvester

Penn · 2023–24

Worked on the BCI decoding pipeline. Now: Quality Engineer (medical devices) at Abbott, Minneapolis, MN.

Yuanchao Zhang

Penn MSE · 2025

Master's thesis on a mathematical method for finding patterns in brain and movement signals. Co-supervised by Iahn Cajigas and Pratik Chaudhari (Penn CIS).