Ariel Gilad is an assistant professor in the Department of Medical Neurobiology in the Faculty of Medicine at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Dr. Gilad's interest in how the whole brain encodes cognitive processes led him to earn a PhD in neuroscience with Dr. Hamutal Slovin at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan in Israel, using wide-field voltage imaging of primary visual cortex in behaving monkeys. During his postdoctoral work, Dr. Gilad continued to study cognitive processing across the whole mouse cortex with Professor Fritjof Helmchen at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
He returned to Israel as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow and expanded his research beyond the cortex to study learning-related dynamics in the auditory thalamus with Dr. Adi Mizrahi at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His current lab studies how cognition is encoded in a brain-wide manner, gaining greater insight into the brain-wide cognitive network in the healthy brain. Dr. Gilad believes that the lab's state-of-the-art techniques and novel approaches will enable further understanding of cognitive brain-wide dynamics at the individual level and lead to breakthroughs in the understanding of healthy and disordered brains.