Swechhya Shrestha, PhD

Swechhya Shrestha, PhD, is a research fellow in McLean’s Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory. Her current research focuses on the functional role of projections from the ventral hippocampus to two islands of intercalated cells in fear-related behavior, including fear learning and fear extinction using an optogenetic approach.

Dr. Shrestha received her PhD from Wesleyan University in 2020. During her doctoral studies, she worked in multilab collaborations to examine whether transplanting interneuron progenitors derived from human embryonic stem cells into epileptic mice brains could restore lost neurons to rescue a diseased phenotype. Her research goal was to study the development of electrophysiological and morphological properties of transplanted human interneurons at different times post-transplantation. She also investigated the differences in seizure propagation between naïve and epileptic brain slices.