Rate My Professor Bila Haider

Bilal Haider is an Associate Professor and Gellerstedt Term Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. He heads the Haider Lab, focusing on neural circuit mechanisms and computations underlying visual perception. Haider earned a B.S. in Cell & Structural Biology in 1999 and an M.S. in Biology (Neurobiology) in 2001 from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He received an M.Phil. in Neurobiology in 2009 and a Ph.D. in Neurobiology in 2009 from Yale University, followed by postdoctoral training at University College London. After his postdoctoral work, he joined the Georgia Tech faculty as an Assistant Professor, advancing to Associate Professor.

Haider's research employs high-resolution electrophysiological recordings (intracellular and extracellular), optogenetic manipulations, functional imaging, sophisticated behavioral tasks, and computational analyses to study how cortical activity dynamics influence visual spatial perception and visual attention. His investigations extend to neural coding, oscillations, and cell-type specific activity disruptions in perceptual deficits linked to autism spectrum disorder and Parkinson's disease. He has secured major awards, including a $2.1 million NIH BRAIN Award for "Circuit and synaptic mechanisms of visual spatial attention," a $300,000 SFARI Pilot Award for neural traffic jams in autism models, and funding from the Whitehall Foundation, Simons Foundation, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Haider teaches undergraduate and graduate courses covering fundamental physiology, neurophysiology, advanced systems and computational neuroscience, and scientific research skills.

His publications feature prominently in leading journals. Key works include "Inhibition dominates sensory responses in the awake cortex" (Nature, 2013), "Spatial attention enhances network, cellular and subthreshold responses in mouse visual cortex" (Nature Communications, 2020), "Narrowband gamma oscillations propagate and synchronize throughout the mouse thalamocortical visual system" (Neuron, 2023), and earlier influential papers such as "Neocortical network activity in vivo is generated through a dynamic balance of excitation and inhibition" (Journal of Neuroscience, 2006, 1161 citations) and "Inhibitory postsynaptic potentials carry synchronized frequency information in active cortical networks" (Neuron, 2005, 774 citations).