Headshot of Nour Omar wearing a white headscarf and burgundy top, standing in front of a brick backdrop.

Nour Omar

Mark and Mary Stevens Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow, PhD Candidate, Neurosciences IDP
Affiliation:
Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellows in Neuroscience

The brain learns to be social the same way it learns anything: through experience, repetition, and time. Absence seizures interrupt all three, and in children with SYNGAP1 neurodevelopmental disorder, they do so relentlessly, alongside profound social difficulties that emerge in parallel. Absence seizures actively rewires the brain through seizure-induced oligodendrogenesis, potentially reshaping the circuits that support social learning. Yet the causal link between seizures and social difficulties remains unresolved and whether maladaptive plasticity is the bridge between them is precisely what my work sets out to test. To answer this, I combine 24-hour EEG recording, 1-photon calcium imaging of medial prefrontal cortex, and longitudinal behavioral phenotyping in SynGAP1+/− mice. This approach lets me watch, in real time, how seizure burden shapes the activity patterns of cells that should be encoding social experience and how preventing seizures can affect this circuit. I pair these circuit-level tools with MRI myelin mapping to capture how oligodendrocyte development, the brain's wiring infrastructure, responds to seizure activity. By understanding how seizures remodel the social brain, I set to open a window into why treating epilepsy could do more than stop seizures: it might restore the developmental trajectory of the social mind.

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