Dr. Zaghloul received his BSc degree from MIT in 1995 and his MD and PhD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. His graduate work focused on developing silicon models of visual processing in the mammalian retina with Dr. Kwabena Boahen. Dr. Zaghloul completed a residency in Neurological Surgery in 2010 from the University of Pennsylvania. During this time, he completed postdoctoral research with Dr. Michael Kahana, investigating the neural correlates of human memory encoding, decision, and reward. Dr. Zaghloul has completed clinical fellowships in Epilepsy Surgery and in Deep Brain Stimulation Surgery. Dr. Zaghloul joined the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health as an Investigator in 2013.

Since joining NINDS, Dr. Zaghloul has established a successful lab that is focused on investigating the neural mechanisms underlying the human brain's ability to encode and retrieve episodic memories, and how we use these memories to make decisions. His lab has provided direct evidence that when we retrieve a memory from our past, distributed patterns of neural activity – present when we first experienced that event – are reinstated. Research efforts in his lab have also examined how decisions are mediated in the brain, and have provided evidence that subcortical structures including the subthalamic nucleus participate in this process. More recently, his lab has drawn upon computational approaches to extend our ability to decode neural signals from the level of larger network interactions to the level of individual neurons. His group has identified stable communication pathways that are used to convey information from one brain region to another, and has made important contributions in obtaining single unit recordings from the awake human brain through the use of implanted microelectrode arrays. This unique approach forms the basis of his ongoing research.