Akshita Rao

I am a fourth-year PhD student in Bioengineering at Stanford University, advised by Dr. Todd Coleman, and co-advised by Dr. Jamie Zeitzer. My doctoral training has been funded through the Stanford Graduate Fellowship in Science & Engineering and the Stanford Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance. My research combines multimodal electrophysiology and wearable sensing to better understand brain-body interactions, with a particular emphasis on sleep and recovery biomarkers.

A central part of my training has been understanding sensor data to both characterize signal behavior and human physiology, identify limitations, and evaluate algorithm performance across conditions. In my doctoral thesis, I analyze ephys recordings during healthy human sleep (EEG, gastric and cardiac autonomic signals), designing pipelines that quantify noise structure, stage- and cycle-dependent dynamics, and cross-signal coupling. In our recent preprint I led, we demonstrate that gut-brain coupling during deep sleep predicts subjective sleep quality, after systematically benchmarking signal stability, coupling metrics, and model generalization across nights and participants.

As such, I’m interested in how peripheral physiology and neural rhythms are coordinated during sleep and wake states, and how these dynamics can inform next-generation biomarkers from wearable and scalable sensing. I anticipate to complete my PhD work in 2027 and am open to opportunities for collaboration!

Research Themes

• Brain-body coupling during sleep
• Wearable signal processing and physiologic modeling
• Translational machine learning for clinical decision support