Dora Angelaki

Dora Angelaki serves as interim director of the BNC.  The main research goal of her laboratory is to understand the mechanisms underlying multisensory integration for motion perception and spatial orientation. Her laboratory studies the processing of visual and vestibular spatiotemporal information, and how such information is used to generate neural representations of space as a function of time. She seeks to understand how multisensory information is processed, integrated and transformed into either commands for movement or perceptual decisions. Recent work also characterizes the spatial orientation and spatial memory systems in the macaque limbic system. The work of the Angelaki laboratory is directed along three main lines: (1) studies in both human and monkey psychophysics, (2) characterization and manipulation of population responses in areas of the cortex, thalamus, brainstem and cerebellum that are involved in visual and vestibular processing, (3) development and testing computational theories of how vestibular information is processed and integrated with visual signals for spatial perception. Her primary research approaches are: neurophysiology in awake behaving non-human primates, anatomical brain imaging, human and monkey psychophysics, and computational modeling.

David Eagleman

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist with joint appointments in the Departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry. His areas of research include time perception, vision, synesthesia, social neuroscience, and the intersection of neuroscience with the legal system. He directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action, and is the founder and director of Baylor College of Medicine’s Initiative on Neuroscience and Law.  

He and his students use neuroimaging to explore issues of time perception, decision making, visual illusions, repetition suppression, predictability, synesthesia, Sensory Processing Disorder, and ingroup/outgroup distinctions.  Funding for his imaging work comes from NIH, DARPA, the Mind Science Foundation, and the Wallace Foundation.

Michael Beauchamp

Dr. Beauchamp is an Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston.  The goal of his research is to determine how the brain translates the rapidly-changing visual information into meaningful actionable concepts such as "wave" or "fist-shake", "hammer" or "saw". This research is important for understanding the difficulties faced by patients who have difficulties interpreting biological motion, such as autism spectrum disorder, and may also have implications for patients with language learning impairments, such as those who have difficulties with the rapid processing required for reading.

Ramiro Salas

Ramiro Salas is an assistant professor in Baylor College of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry, specializing in human brain imaging of addiction disorders, the role of the habenula in addiction and depression and genetic datamining with the goal of obtaining anatomical hypotheses of disease.

Andreas Tolias

Adreas Tolias is assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience, who received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Techology in 2000.  The goal of his research team is to unravel the elementary principles that underlie cortical computations in the quest to discover the canonical algorithm(s) implemented by cortical microcircuits. He studies cortical function in vivo in behaving animals at the circuit level by following a multidisciplinary approach: he combines electrophysiological and two-photon imaging methods for multi-neuronal recording with molecular techniques for circuit tracing and manipulation.  He uses computational and theoretical methods for data analysis and for modeling cortical circuit function. Currently, his work focuses on the visual system of mice and non-human primates. His goal is to follow a cross-species and cross-cortical area comparison in order to identify similarities and differences between the algorithms of the necortex. He hopes that this approach will provide a unique window to study the evolution of the neocortex. Numerous neuropsychiatric illnesses such as autism spectrum disorders, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia are associated with cortical malfunction, underscoring the importance of understanding how the neocortex works.

Stelios Smirnakas

Stelios Smirnakis is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Neuroscience and Neurology.  The goals of Dr. Smirnakis’ research program are twofold: 1) to study the rules of neural plasticity and reorganization following nervous system injury in order to develop strategies that promote neural recovery, and 2) to study the rules by which visual stimuli are encoded in the firing patterns of ensembles of neurons, with a particular focus on the influence that stimulus history (adaptation) has on neural responses.  Neural computations in the primate brain involve the concerted activity of many neuronal units both within and across multiple brain areas (distributed coding). In order to understand and eventually promote neural repair, it is necessary to both appreciate the fundamental principles of neural computation at the level of the local neuronal circuits and to examine in vivo how the brain as a whole adjusts to injury in one of its parts.

Phil Baldwin

Phil Baldwin is trained in theoretical physics and applied mathematics and has been interacting with BNC since 2003. Phil has collaborated on various projects at BNC, including dopamine release, financial math and functional MRI. His current projects include imaging small midbrain structures and developing frameworks for analyzing social exchanges. Phil received an undergraduate degree in Physics from Princeton and MS and Ph.D in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has spent time working in a corporate environment at Schlumberger Doll research and the former Bell Center.

Dorina Papageorgiou

Dorina Papgeorgiou is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Neuroscience. The goal of her research is to study and compare visual training rehabilitation strategies with a novel neurofeedback method called real-time (rt) fMRI feedback. fMRI has increased our understanding of the functional organization of the human visual cortex allowing quantitative measurements of cortical topography (Wandel, 1999; Smirnakis et al., 2005), and estimation of voxel-base receptive field sizes. This neurofeedback method is based on monitoring brain activity patterns using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which refers to the visualization of the brain activation in real-time, and then using those patterns to provide feedback to the subject. The aim is to promote recovery by teaching the subject to upregulate activity in spared, V1 bypassing, visual pathways that are partially activated during stimulus presentation. This method will allow us to enhance the neural capacity for learning and plasticity along the visual pathways necessary to promote visual recovery. Although this application focuses on visual network rehabilitation (Papageorgiou and Smirnakis, in press inTech), the rt-fMRI neurofeedback method is applicable to other neural domains, such as cognitive, speech and language, sensorimotor etc. For example, the rt-fMRI neurofeedback approach can result in improved motor and speech task performance in healthy subjects.

Christen Symank

Christen Symank began working at the BNC in June 2010. As a Research Technician, Christen screens and scans participants for various fMRI experiments. She also trains new users to run the scanners for their experiments at the BNC. Christen received her Bachelor of Science in Animal Science from Texas A&M University in 2010.

Pat Martinez

Pat Martinez has been with Baylor since November of 1998 and joined the BNC in September of 2004. She is the Sr. Administrative Assistant for the BNC. Some of her duties include SAP document management, annual budget preparation and monitoring, schedule management, research participant recruitment and screening, as well as procurement management.

Krystle Bartley

Krystle Bartley (CV) joined the BNC in June of 2007. Krystle received her B.S. in Psychology from Xavier University of Louisiana in 2003, and earned a Master's Degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of Houston - Clear Lake. Her role in the lab involves training staff, students, and post-doctoral scientists in safety and imaging procedures. Krystle also recruits volunteers for fMRI studies and manages the scheduling system for the five-scanner cluster.

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