Position Title
Assistant Professor
- Former member of the Steering Committee
Dr. Saez studies the neurophysiological basis of human cognition - how electrical activity generated in the brain underlies human thoughts and actions. To do this, he leverages interventions that require the implantation of electrodes in the brain of neurosurgical patients, such as electrocorticography (ECoG) or stereotactic EEG (sEEG) in epilepsy patients. These interventions provide direct access to electrical brain activity with high spatial and temporal resolution. Patients complete cognitive tasks, which allows assessing the relationship between complex spatiotemporal brain activity patterns and behavior.
A major focus of the lab is the study of decision-making - how we make choices and learn from their outcomes. Often this is done through the use of computational models, which provide mathematical depictions of different aspects of choice behavior which are otherwise hard to capture (i.e. regret). From this basis, Dr. Saez explores the intersection of decision-making with other aspects of cognition (social behavior, learning and memory, etc) as well as the implications for pathologies in which decision-making is damaged, such as addiction or obsessive-compulsive disorder, with the long-term goal of designing biologically-informed neuromodulatory therapeutical strategies.
Dr. Saez joined the School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in 2021, where he is an Assistant Professor in Neuroscience, Neurosurgery, and Neurology.