An unfortunate reality of my PhD experience is that I was not able to publish my work as a “first author.” This was partly due to serious health issues that I faced at the start of my second year in grad school which were further compounded by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While I do not have a “first author paper,” I intentionally wrote my dissertation in a way that would make it easy to share my work with others.

With this mind, I recently decided to host my full dissertation here to make it easily accessible. No dissertation is perfect, and mine is no exception to this fact. However, I can say that this thesis does represent a major conceptual framework that continues to drive my interdisciplinary work applying engineering approaches to solve challenging technical problems in neuroscience. I hope that this humble document may be of value to others.