Wesley Smith

Expert scientist / software engineer with acumen in signal processing on large-scale datasets, electrophysiology / brain machine interfaces, and biobehavioral protocols. A driven leader of successful projects on epilepsy, hearing, addiction, and information structure, with a track record of device and software development, particularly in MATLAB.

I am an autodidactic learner of scientific protocols, software & technical equipment, and languages. I have pivoted from academic research into the highly competitive American pharmaceutical business and again into the prestigious

Outstanding Invited NRF Brainpool Scientific Fellow program. I have developed and refined extensive protocols for in vivo electrophysiological experimentation, behavior work, and ex vivo culture and slice research, both in industry and academic settings. I am well-versed in corporate business, culture, and research practices.

The Brainpool grant itself that I have finished was worth an equivalent amount of funding as an American R01 grant, and during my 2.5 year tenure as Brainpool Fellow at KIST and Korea University Medical School, I have authored 2 first-author preprints, co-authored work on the neuropharmaceutical KDS2010, and have 3 publications and 1 review in preparation.

My most recent work focuses on challenging assumptions about ischemia in thick brain slices ex vivo, in order to assess functional connectivity in multiple brain regions with 3D silicon probe arrays. This protocol and experimental platform has great potential for applications in neuropharmaceutical research as a link between whole-cell recordings and in vivo experimentation. To accomplish this work, I wrote a fully automated spike-sorter and LFP analysis algorithm with no external dependencies for non-expert experimenters to use.

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Scientific / Research Experience

Postdoctoral Research

Invited NRF Brain Pool Scientific Fellow | KIST & Korea University | Il-Joo Cho Lab 2021 - Present

Project: Development of electrophysiological biomarkers and drug test platforms for the treatment of neurological disease using high-density neural probes in thick brain slices

Biopharmaceutical Scientist | Amgen | Global Medical Affairs Neuroinflamm. Division 2020 - 2021

 Responsible for Aimovig MoA research using whole cell and multielectrode slice & in vivo recordings

 Optimized trigeminal ganglia culture protocols and electrophysiology optics & solutions

 Initiated drug target identification process through literature review, mutant tissue dissection, & NGS

Senior Development Engineer | W.M. Keck Center for Neurophysics 2018 - 2020

Project: Adaptation of silicon probes for high-density chronic dendritic electrophysiology

 Created novel surface chemistry protocols for electroplating ultra-low impedance ( < 20 kΩ)

neuroprobes and showed imaging correlates of impedance changes through electron microscopy

 Performed chronic implantations of these NeuroNex electrode arrays with new techniques to assess brain information structure, resulting in robust neural signals for more than three months

 Adapted Mountainlab with Python/MATLAB/Ubuntu bash scripting for the lab’s tetrode array recordings, as well as UCLA NeuroNex recordings, which automated the data pipeline and reduced clustering time by more than 100-fold

Doctoral Research

PhD Candidate | UCLA NSIDP | Dissertation advisor: Sotiris C. Masmanidis 2012 - 2018

Project: High-density in vivo recordings for multi-region correlates of addiction and encoding

 Piloted a novel 1D head-fixed virtual reality CPP test for use with natural and drug rewards, as well as developed a novel odor preference test for head-fixed mice with pupillometry based on cocaine conditioning and wrote a machine vision algorithm for data analysis in MATLAB and LabVIEW

 Performed tracing studies to inform custom 512-channel NeuroNex probe design, used these probes to simultaneously record cortex and striatum in vivo, and demonstrated that proportion of frontostriatal inhibition and degree of gamma coherence correlates to drug-cue induced behavioral arousal

 Developed MATLAB toolkits to assess critical neural population dynamics in vivo as well as a novel method to quantify critical tuning in the cortex, showing it is enhanced in early cocaine abstinence and predicts cue-induced behavioral arousal, and that the system complexity in the the cortex and striatum is coupled to criticality in drug-naïve mice, but the correlation is altered in dosed mice

 This project formed part of the basis for two P50 DA grants, an R01 DA grant, and the UCLA NSF

NeuroNex Technology Hub grants, all worth more than $4 million

Graduate Student | UCLA NSIDP / EE. Dept | Advisor: Jin Hyung Lee 2011 - 2012

Project: Development of an optogenetic fMRI model of epilepsy and targeted seizure propagation

 Established a novel optogenetic model of epilepsy in rats coupled to fMRI and EEG in vivo at the whole-brain circuit level and created a new behavioral protocol to assess seizures

 Discovered reproducible, frequency-dependent neural networks recruited by dorsal and intermediate hippocampal optogenetic stimulation of pyramidal neurons, which results in different seizure types

 This work was part of the basis for an R01 grant worth $1.8 million

Graduate Rotation Research

Graduate Student | UCLA NSIDP 2011

 Learned in vitro whole-cell patch clamp slice recording techniques in Felix Schweizer’s laboratory

 Learned 2-photon microscopy and Ca2+ imaging techniques in Joshua Trachtenberg’s laboratory

Honors Undergraduate Research

Undergraduate Researcher | U. of Iowa Biology Dept. | Advisor: Daniel Eberl 2008 through 2010

Project: Investigating acoustic trauma in Drosophila melanogaster

 Designed and assembled a custom acoustic trauma chamber for flies, made in vivo recordings from

Drosophila antennae, uncovered hidden auditory phenotypes in flies heterozygous for a mutant

ATPase, and was the first to reveal acoustic trauma / noise induced hearing loss (NIHL) in insects

 Generated new fly lines with reporters in mitochondria to assess oxidative stress as a basis for NIHL

 This Honors thesis was the direct basis of a successful R21 grant worth $414,000

Education The University of California, Los Angeles | Ph.D. in Neuroscience, GPA: 3.65 2010 through 2018

Thesis: Interindividual variation in frontostriatal circuit dynamics correlates to degree of neural criticality and predicts cocaine cue-evoked behavioral arousal during early abstinence The University of Iowa | Bachelor of Science in Neurobiology with Honors, GPA: 3.55 2006 through 2010

Thesis: Acoustic trauma in Drosophila melanogaster

Minor in Asian Languages and Literature (Japanese)

Honors & Awards

KSBNS 2023 Outstanding Poster Presentation Award 2023

NRF Outstanding Invited Brainpool Scientific Fellow 2021

Nominated by UCLA for the Schmidt Science Fellows Program 2018

T32 Predoctoral Training Grant NIH T32DA024635 recipient

UCLA Department of Neurobiology Retreat, best poster award 2013

Awarded University Fellowship (UCLA) 2012

Shortlist applicant to Janelia Farm’s summer undergraduate program 2009

Admitted into the Undergraduate Honors Research program at the University of Iowa 2009

Dean’s List at the University of Iowa 2008 & 2009

Awarded University of Iowa Tuition Scholarship 2006

Awarded Marguerite V. Brown Trust Scholarship 2006

Inducted into the National Honor Society 2005

Invited to National Youth Leadership Forum on Medicine 2005

Won Omaha’s Rotary Club Camp Enterprise business competition 2005