Research ends with doctoral honor

Aaron Lee Kasey Sampson, son of Kenneth Sampson of Chickasha and Zora Lobaugh Sampson of Pauls Valley and grandson of Imogene Gay Garland Lobaugh, completed his doctoral research and successfully defended his PhD thesis on May 13.

He has earned the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Neurosciences from the University of California San Diego.

His research under Professor Terrence J. Sejnowski focused on analyzing brain states using advanced signal processing techniques and resulted in several published papers.

During his graduate studies, Aaron also served as the chair of the American Indian Graduate Student Association at UC San Diego.

Aaron will be moving to Johns Hopkins University as a postdoctoral fellow with Professor Ernst Niebur.

Aaron completed his undergraduate Bachelor of Science in Physics, with a minor in Spanish, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known by most simply as MIT.

He then worked as a research technician at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

In 2018 he was awarded the National Institutes of Health Diversity Specialized Predoctoral to Postdoctoral Advancement in Neuroscience Award.

The UCSD Intertribal Council Resource Center hosted Aaron and other graduates to a dinner and presented him with a UCSD Triton beaded medallion and a graduation stole that read “2019 Native Grad, Aaron Sampson, Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.”

Aaron was born in Norman, Okla., and graduated from Rice Lake High School in Rice Lake, Wisconsin.