Haleh received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran, her M.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of Houston, and her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Baylor College of Medicine. She has pursued postdoctoral research at McGill University, University of Ottawa, and most recently at Harvard University. Her PhD work focused on characterizing the neural mechanisms and sensory-motor transformations that underlie generation of visually evoked escape behaviors in locusts and Drosophila. Her postdoctoral research extended these studies to investigate the neural basis of variability, context-, and experience-dependence of sensory evoked behaviors. Her scientific endeavors have also resulted in technical breakthroughs such as wireless neural recording in small freely moving insects and freely swimming fish.
As a Senior Scientist at the Wyss Institute, Haleh is working on discovering cellular mechanisms underlying primitive cognition in biological robots, as well as driving efforts to understand the effect of prolonged stasis on memory formation and recall.