Dr. Abdelrahman (Abdel) Rayan is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Genzel Lab within the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands. His expertise spans medicine, systems neuroscience, mathematical modelling, machine learning, and experimental neurophysiology. He earned his Ph.D. from Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, under the mentorship of Prof. Dr. Denise Manahan-Vaughan, where he investigated neural mechanisms underlying sensory information processing in the hippocampus and thalamus. Following his doctoral studies, he joined Associate Prof. Lisa Genzel (Genzel Lab) in the Netherlands to further explore the intersection of sleep and memory. Dr. Rayan’s research focuses on uncovering the neural mechanisms that drive memory formation and their transformation into semantic knowledge, particularly using the object space task developed at Genzel lab. Additionally, he is developing automated sleep-scoring tools and other computational approaches to examine sleep architecture and the impact of learning and different experimental manipulations on sleep. His work aims to identify fine-grained sleep states in rodents and determine the precise contributions of different sleep stages to memory consolidation and information processing during sleep. To achieve these goals, he integrates in vivo electrophysiology with advanced data analysis techniques and machine learning, bridging experimental and computational neuroscience to explore sleep’s role in cognition.
