Alireza Ghahari received his B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the Sharif University of Technology, Iran, in August 2007. Thereafter, he completed his M.Sc. in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Tehran, Iran, in March 2010. During those years of study, he gained valuable insights into systems engineering by taking courses in a variety of contexts, such as statistical signal processing, information theory and coding, computer vision, and pattern recognition. He started his Ph.D. in the ECE department at University of Connecticut in Fall 2010. His dissertation major advisor was Prof. John Enderle. He has come to realize the profound contributions of Prof. Enderle in the field of theoretical and computational neuroscience, and truly considers John to be a major influence, both academically and personally. His research areas of interest include spiking neural networks analysis and implementation, brain computer interface, and development of computational techniques.