BIO

Omar grew up in Cairo, Egypt and received his B.E. degree in Biomedical Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology, NJ, where he worked on a pediatric medical device for monitoring airflow following a tracheostomy. Currently a BME PhD candidate, co-advised by Mike Economo, Omar is interested in understanding brain machine interfaces and investigating multi-region communication. Outside of work, he enjoys playing soccer, basketball, and tennis, traveling with family and friends, and playing Pro Clubs and COD.

Current Work

Omar is developing deep learning and statistical models to uncover inter-regional interactions from simultaneous multi-region neural and behavioral recordings in mice, characterizing the content, direction, and timing of communication across sensorimotor circuits during voluntary movement. He previously explored the influence of Motor Cortex (Mtx) cell types on the dynamics of downstream subcortical regions within the brain’s orofacial circuit, using cell-type specific optogenetic perturbations to investigate how distinct cell types shape sensory-guided movements and drive unique dynamics in downstream circuits.

Publications

• El Sayed, O., Han, Y., Dragoi, T., Economo, M.N., DePasquale, B. (2026). BiXformer: A Bidirectional Cross Attention Transformer for Disentangling Inter-regional Neural Dynamics. Under review at ICLR 2027; preprint available on bioRxiv.

• Birnbaum, J.E., El Sayed, O., Ugarte Nunez, J., Palmer, D., DePasquale, B., Economo, M.N. Motor cortex differentially shapes subcortical movement dynamics through distinct descending projections Manuscript in preparation.

Presentations

• Birnbaum, J.E., El Sayed, O., Ugarte Nunez, J.L., Palmer, D., DePasquale, B., Economo, M.N. (2025). Motor cortex differentially shapes subcortical movement dynamics through distinct descending projections. Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA.