Uri Eden, Ph.D.

Research

I develop statistical and mathematical methods for analyzing neural spiking activity and use them to understand how the brain represents and processes information. Much of this work centers on point process models, a statistical framework for relating the timing of neural spikes to the biological and behavioral signals that drive them.

I apply these methods in two directions. One is methodological, building estimation algorithms, goodness of fit tools, and mathematical theory that can be applied to any spiking neural system. The other is applied, using these tools to study how neurons and neural populations represent information during learning, memory, and rest. This includes work on how the hippocampus replays past experience and represents nonlocal space during exploration, and more recently, how brain rhythms such as sleep spindles are organized in time, and how that organization changes with aging and with conditions such as Down syndrome and Alzheimer's disease.

Research Themes

• Point process and state space models for neural spike train data
• Clusterless decoding methods that bypass spike sorting
• Hippocampal coding: place cells, time cells, replay, and theta sequences
• Rhythmic brain dynamics, including sleep spindle timing across health and disease
• Statistical methods for dynamic functional networks, including seizure dynamics

Selected Publications

• Kass RE, Eden UT, Brown EN. Analysis of Neural Data.
  Springer, 2014.
• Kramer MA, Eden UT. Case Studies in Neural Data Analysis.
  MIT Press, 2016.
• Truccolo W, Eden UT, Fellows MR, Donoghue JP, Brown EN. A point process framework for relating neural spiking activity to spiking history, neural ensemble, and extrinsic covariate effects.
  Journal of Neurophysiology, 2005.
• Deng X, Liu DF, Kay K, Frank LM, Eden UT. Clusterless decoding of position from multiunit activity using a marked point process filter.
  Neural Computation, 2015.
• MacDonald CJ, Lepage KQ, Eden UT, Eichenbaum HB. Hippocampal time cells bridge the gap in memory for discontiguous events.
  Neuron, 2011.
• Denovellis EL, Gillespie AK, Coulter ME, Sosa M, Chung JE, Eden UT, Frank LM. Hippocampal replay of experience at real-world speeds.
  eLife, 2021.
• Chen S, He M, Brown RE, Eden UT, Prerau MJ. Individualized temporal patterns drive human sleep spindle timing.
  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025.
• Kramer MA, Eden UT, Kolaczyk ED, Zepeda R, Eskandar EN, Cash SS. Coalescence and fragmentation of cortical architecture during focal seizures.
  Journal of Neuroscience, 2010.