Institute of Neuroscience Menu

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<p>Our laboratory is focused on two problems in neurobiology: (1) Active sensing, where we are delineating the brainstem circuitry that coordinates orofacial motor actions, e.g., sniffing, licking, head bobbing, and whisking, into behaviors. This work involves anatomy, behavior, and electro- and opto-physiology with rodents ad strives to make connections with control theory. (2) Blood flow in the brain, for which we connect measurements of the topology of the vasculature with neuronal control of flow dynamics from the level of large-scale vascular networks down to single microvessels. This work involves anatomy, physiology, and deep-brain optical imaging with rodents and strives to make connections with graph theory and fluid dynamics. Our efforts in both areas involve a broad range of approaches together with the opportunity to develop new tools. Please see our web site for further information concerning our work and recent publications.</p>

<p><a href="https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://biology.ucsd.edu/research/faculty/dk… more</a></p>
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<p>Abstract: In recent years, advances in systems neuroscience have been facilitated by an increasing mindset of sharing. The increased complexity of experiments and data analysis make continuing this trend critical. In this talk, I will present three examples of new open source tools that my lab has developed, and describe our vision for how they will support new science at Rice University and around the world. These three tools span the process of (1) managing and controlling behavioral experiments with an easily extensible, low-cost Python based virtual reality system; (2) acquiring fluorescence data in mice in experiments that push the limits of frame rate, signal strength, and/or imaging duration with the MiniFAST; and (3) conducting spectral analysis of extremely large datasets in Python with GhostiPy. We expect that these tools will be broadly useful, but I hope that my talk will also inspire the audience to commit to doing their part to contributing to the furthering of science with an open source mindset.</p>

<p><a href="https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://rnel.rice.edu/__;!!C5qS4YX3!XHf0I-mJ… more</a></p>
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<a href="https://thielelab.ca/">Learn more</a>

<p>Summary of current research</p>

<p>The myelin sheath surrounding axons is one of the most&nbsp;exquisite examples of a specialized cell-cell interaction in the vertebrate nervous system. Myelin is formed by glial cells called oligodendrocytes in the central nervous system and Schwann cells in the peripheral nervous system. These cells associate with axons, and elaborate massive amounts of cytoplasm, ultimately wrapping axons to form the myelin sheath. While progress has been made to determine how glial cells make myelin, there is still much we do not understand.</p>

<p>How do glial cells transition from simple axonal ensheathment to membrane spiraling? What are the signals between glial cells and axons that regulate myelination? How is myelin maintained once it is formed? When myelin regenerates in disease or after injury, do the same developmental pathways that regulate myelination regulate remyelination? Or are there additional pathways necessary for this process, specific to adult tissue?</p>

<p>We use mouse and zebrafish models to better understand how myelinated axons are formed, maintained, and regenerated.&nbsp;</p>

<p><b><a href="https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.ohsu.edu/vollum-institute/kelly… more</a>&nbsp;</b></p>
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<blockquote type="cite"><p>Abstract: An animal eye is only as efficient as the organism�s behavioral constraints demand it to be. While efficient coding has been a successful organizational principle in vision, to make a more general theory, behavioral, mechanistic, and even evolutionary constraints need to be added to this framework. In our work, we use a mix of known computational hurdles and detailed behavioral measurements to add constraints to the notion of optimality in vision. Accurate visual prediction is one such constraint. Prediction is essential for interacting fluidly and accurately with our environment because of the delays inherent to all brain circuits. In order to interact appropriately with a changing environment, the brain must respond not only to the current state of sensory inputs but must also make rapid predictions of the future. In our work, we explore how our visual system makes these predictions, starting as early as the eye. We borrow techniques from statistical physics and information processing to assess how we get terrific, predictive vision from these imperfect (lagged and noisy) component parts. To test whether the visual system performs optimal predictive compression and computation, we compute the past and future stimulus information in populations of retinal ganglion cells, and in the vertical motion sensing system of the fly. In the fly, we anchor our calculations with careful measurements from the Dickinson group on fast evasive flight maneuvers. This survival-critical behavior requires fast and accurate control of flight, which we show can be achieved by visual prediction in the fly vertical sensing system, via a specific wiring motif. Moving on from behavior, developing a general theory of the evolution of computation is a current research direction in our group. We use the repeated evolution of tetra-chromatic color vision in butterflies to test hypotheses about whether neural computations contain shadows of the evolutionary history of the organism.</p><p>Bio: Stephanie Palmer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and in the Department of Physics at the University of Chicago. She has a PhD in theoretical physics from Oxford University where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and works on questions at the interface of neuroscience and statistical physics. Her recent work explores the question of how the visual system processes incoming information to make fast and accurate predictions about the future positions of moving objects in the environment. She was named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow and holds a CAREER award from the NSF. Starting during her undergraduate years at Michigan State University, Stephanie has been teaching chemistry, physics, math, and biology to a wide range of students. At the University of Chicago, she founded and runs the Brains! Program, which brings local middle school kids from the South Side of Chicago to her lab to learn hands-on neuroscience.</p></blockquote>

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are still important challenges in academia. To identify key DEI issues in brain sciences worldwide and develop specific strategies, a group of leading scientists has founded the ALBA Network to combat diversity and inclusion in research and academia. I will introduce the network and its main activities, and will discuss how stress -in general, and the one triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic in particular- can have a particularly negative impact in the lives and careers of women and under-represented groups. To illustrate the latter, I will refer to work in our lab and the broader literature reporting how stress can affect social behaviors as well as a differential impact in different individuals.|full_html

Across brain regions and species, one key feature of neural activity is that responses are highly variable. Hence, (one of) the biggest computation problems of the brain is to compensate for its own internal noise. This interpretation is challenged by experimental data: in many contexts the brain seems to actively put itself in a dynamic regime where responses are highly variable, which suggests that there may be computational advantages to having a seemingly ‘noisy’ brain.&nbsp;In this talk I will discuss a new theoretical framework for how low-dimensional structured noise can be used to dynamically route task-specific information between neural populations.&nbsp; I will show how appropriate noise structure can be learned in artificial neural networks from limited data and&nbsp;find signatures of such coding in&nbsp;population recordings from macaque V1 and MT during a discrimination task (Ruff &amp; Cohen, 2016).&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="https://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/cristina-savin.html">Learn more</a>|full_html

<p>To understand how cortical circuits generate complex behavior, it is crucial to investigate the cell types that comprise them. Functional differences across pyramidal neuron (PyN) types have been observed in sensory and frontal cortex, but it is not known whether these differences are the rule across all cortical areas or if different PyN types mostly follow the same cortex-wide dynamics. We used genetic and retrograde labeling to target pyramidal tract (PT), intratelencephalic (IT) and corticostriatal projection neurons and measured their cortex-wide activity. Each PyN type drove unique neural dynamics at a cortex-wide and within-area scale. Cortical activity and optogenetic inactivation during an auditory discrimination task also revealed distinct functional roles: all PyNs in parietal cortex were recruited during sensory stimulation but, surprisingly, PT neurons were most important for perception. In frontal cortex, all PyNs were required for accurate choices but showed distinct choice-tuning. Our results reveal that rich, cell-type-specific cortical dynamics shape perceptual decisions.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="https://neurobio.ucla.edu/people/anne-churchland/">Learn more</a></p>
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