Saarang Panchavati

Hello! I’m Saarang, a fifth-year PhD candidate at UCLA advised by Dr. William Speier. I work on using deep learning to better understand the brain (and sometimes vice versa).

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research focus

At UCLA, I focus on three main questions:

Can we develop a foundation model for EEG that is useful for clinical applications?
Can we uncover how seizures are modulated?
Can we use deep learning to identify biomarkers and guide epilepsy treatment protocols?

current work

I’m also interested in more fundamental neuroscience questions, like “how does the brain process information?” In 2025, I spent six months in London interning with the BrainAI team at Meta FAIR, where I worked on new approaches to this problem (paper coming soon!).

news

Mar 10, 2025	Started an internship with the BrainAI team at FAIR!

selected publications

Pretrained transformers for seizure detection

Saarang Panchavati, Samuel Vander Dussen, Hemal Semwal, and 5 more authors

In ICASSP 2023-2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2023

Bib

@inproceedings{panchavati2023pretrained,
  title = {Pretrained transformers for seizure detection},
  author = {Panchavati, Saarang and Vander Dussen, Samuel and Semwal, Hemal and Ali, Ahmed and Chen, Justin and Li, Haoran and Arnold, Corey and Speier, William},
  booktitle = {ICASSP 2023-2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
  pages = {1--2},
  year = {2023},
  organization = {IEEE},
}

Uncovering spatiotemporal dynamics of the corticothalamic network at ictal onset

Saarang Panchavati, Atsuro Daida, Benjamin Edmonds, and 8 more authors

Epilepsia, 2024

Bib

@article{panchavati2024uncovering,
  title = {Uncovering spatiotemporal dynamics of the corticothalamic network at ictal onset},
  author = {Panchavati, Saarang and Daida, Atsuro and Edmonds, Benjamin and Miyakoshi, Makoto and Oana, Shingo and Ahn, Samuel S and Arnold, Corey and Salamon, Noriko and Sankar, Raman and Fallah, Aria and others},
  journal = {Epilepsia},
  volume = {65},
  number = {7},
  pages = {1989--2003},
  year = {2024},
}

Mentality: A Mamba-based Approach towards Foundation Models for EEG

Saarang Panchavati, Corey Arnold, and William Speier

In The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024

Bib

@inproceedings{panchavati2024mentality,
  title = {Mentality: A Mamba-based Approach towards Foundation Models for EEG},
  author = {Panchavati, Saarang and Arnold, Corey and Speier, William},
  booktitle = {The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
  year = {2024},
}

about me

I’m also a struggling Arsenal fan (is this our year???????), and I like composing for piano, singing Indian classical music, taking pictures of plants (@plantchavati), and training for more half marathons. If I wasn’t doing this, I’d probably study history (current favorite podcast).