Sean O Connell

Sean O’Connell

Sean O’Connell

Sean O’Connell


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Ph.D. Candidate; Biomedical Engineering program at Emory and Georgia Tech
M.S. in Biomedical Engineering; Emory and Georgia Tech
B.S. in Biomedical Engineering; Texas A&M University


Research Interests

Sean began his time in the Sober Lab in 2017 as a Research Specialist, building a hardware system and novel algorithm for quantification of calcium-related light signals in populations of neurons. After that two-year project, he was accepted into the BME Ph.D. program at Emory and GT, where he developed several hardware systems for quantifying a wide variety of rat behaviors, like forelimb reaching and rotation, and treadmill locomotion. He also developed several Python and MATLAB libraries for acquiring and analyzing these signals to better understand the coordination of populations of motor units within single muscles across behaviors. Finally, his Ph.D. work has been devoted to developing an improved motor unit spike sorter, EMUsort. In his free time, he enjoys reading books, spending time in nature, and interesting conversations.


Key Papers

Chung et al 2023 figure 1
Myomatrix arrays for high-definition muscle recording
Chung B, Zia M, Thomas KA, Michaels JA, Jacob A, Pack A, Williams MJ, Nagapudi K, Teng LH, Arrambide E, Ouellette L, Oey N, Gibbs R, Anschutz P, Lu J, Wu Y, Kashefi M, Oya T, Kersten R, Mosberger AC, O'Connell S, Wang R, Marques H, Mendes AR, Lenschow C, Kondakath G, Kim JJ, Olson W, Quinn KN, Perkins P, Gatto G, Thanawalla A, Coltman S, Kim T, Smith T, Binder-Markey B, Zaback M, Thompson CK, Giszter S, Person A, Goulding M, Azim E, Thakor N, O'Connor D, Trimmer B, Lima SQ, Carey MR, Pandarinath. ELife 12:RP88551 (2023) [PDF] [DOI]


Commentary

Accessing populations of motor units
Kirk EA, Sauerbrei BA. eLife 2024;13:e94764. (2024) [PDF] [DOI]