More recently, I have started on an project to "sequence the connectome." More on that below.
I have been at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory since 1999. As a graduate student I worked with Christof Koch (Caltech) and Tom Brown (Yale), and as a postdoc with Chuck Stevens (Salk Institute). I have published some papers and have also founded some meetings, including the annual Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) meeting, which now draws over 600 participants.
My laboratory is interested in how neural circuits underlie sensory processing and attention, particularly in the auditory cortex. To address these questions, we use a combination of computational, electrophysiological and imaging techniques at the molecular, synaptic, cellular, circuit and behavioral levels.
Research in the lab is organized into two broad areas. On the physiology side, we study how the cortex represents sounds, how these representations are converted into actions, and how they are modulated by attention, motivation and other cognitive variables. We mostly study rodents (both rats and mice) performing two-alternative choice tasks in which the subject uses sounds and other stimuli to make a decision. Our behavioral approaches are inspired by work in awake behaving primates, but we use rodents as the model system, we can exploit the full armamentarium of modern cellular and molecular neuroscience techniques.
The second research area is the development of a technique to sequence the connectome. The basic idea is that DNA sequencing technologies are fast and cheap, and getting faster and cheaper by the day---the race is for the "thousand dollar genome." So our idea is to convert the problem of the connectome (ie figuring out which neurons are connected to which other neurons) into a problem amenable to sequencing.
Qiaojie Xiong
Postdoc BS (Bio, Hefei) PhD (Physiology, Johns Hopkins)
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Hassana Oyibo
Grad Student BS (Bio, SUNY)
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Peter Znamenskiy
Grad Student MSci (Bio, U Glasgow)
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Hysell Oviedo
Postdoc BS PhD (Neuro, NYU) |
Santiago Jaramillo
Postdoc BS (EE, Colombia) PhD (EE/CS, Ireland)
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Katharine Borges
Postdoc BS (Bio, UC Davis) PhD (Neuro, UC Berkeley) |
Ashlan Reid
Postdoc BS, (Neuro, Duke) PhD (Neuro, UPenn)
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Barry Burbach
Senior Technician |
Ching Zhan
Postdoc MS (BME, Shanghai) PhD (Bio, Singapore)
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Gang Cao
Postdoc MS (Mol Genetics, Sichuan) PhD (Physiology, Nijmegen) |
Ian Peikon
Grad Student BSE (BME, Duke)
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Sang Geol Koh
Grad Student BS (Physics, Seoul) |
Tomas Hromadka
Postdoc MS (CS, Prague) MD (Prague) PhD (Neuro, CSHL) |
Yang Yang
Grad Student BS (BME, Hangzhou) PhD (Neuro, SUNY)
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Simon Rumpel
(Former member; now Faculty at IMP, Vienna) |
Mike Wehr
(Former member; now Faculty at U of Oregon, Eugene) |
Hiroki Asari
(Former member; now Postdoc at Harvard with Markus Meister) |
Mike DeWeese (Former member; now Faculty at UC Berkeley) |
Susana Lima
(Former member; now Faculty at Insituto Gulbenkian) |
Marta Moita (Former member; now Faculty at Insituto Gulbenkian) |