Sam Sober

Sam Sober is an Associate Professor at Emory University and Director of the Center for Advanced Motor Bioengineering and Research, as well as the Collaboration on Motor Planning, Execution, and Resilience. He leads the Sober Lab, which investigates how the nervous system controls muscle activity to produce skilled movements in songbirds. His research combines electrophysiological recordings, behavioral experiments, and computational modeling to study sensorimotor learning and neural plasticity.

Education: B.A., Wesleyan University (1998); Ph.D., University of California, San Francisco (2005). Research focuses on neural-muscular interactions, with recent work exploring motor coding in songbirds, inertial load effects on motor cortex, and advanced electrode technologies for muscle recording.

Lab achievements include César Vargas’s 2025 Helen Hays Whitney Fellowship and Abi Grassler and Ethan Corey advancing to PhD candidacy in 2025. The lab develops tools like flexible EMG arrays and optogenetic systems to study motor control mechanics. Key research themes include spiking codes for motor control, neuromodulatory mechanisms of plasticity, and Bayesian inference in sensorimotor learning.

Scientific contributions span neurophysiology, biomedical engineering, and animal behavior. Ongoing work includes decoding neural activity patterns and translating findings to improve understanding of motor disorders and neural rehabilitation strategies.