Sri Sarma


Sridevi Sarma is an American Biomedical and
Electrical Engineer. Her research combines learning theory and control systems with neuroscience to create translational work aimed at improving therapies for neurological disorders, including Parkinson's disease and epilepsy. Sarma has conducted research using control theoretic tools that provided an explanation of how deep brain stimulation therapy works for PD.
Sarma is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Neurology at the Johns Hopkins University. She is the associate director of the Institute for Computational Medicine at the Whiting School of Engineering and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Biography

Sarma did her undergraduate studies at Cornell University where she received her Bachelor of Engineering degree in 1994. She then went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, in 1997 and 2006. From 2000-2003 she took a leave of absence to start a data analytics company. From 2006-2009, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the MIT Brain and Cognitive Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sarma is a recipient of the GE faculty for the future scholarship, a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow, a L'Oreal For Women in Science fellow, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Careers at the Scientific Interface Award the Krishna Kumar New Investigator Award from the North American Neuromodulation Society and a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and the Whiting School of Engineering Robert B. Pond Excellence in Teaching Award.

Work

Sarma has conducted fundamental research using control theoretic tools that provided an explanation of how deep brain stimulation therapy works for PD. Through a biophysically-based model, she provided a different mechanism of how DBS works, namely that it does not create an information lesion, but rather that high frequency DBS restores signals in the neural circuit that control movements.
Sarma has participated in the National Geographic TV series, Brain Games.