Zuckerman Institute
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This is the institute I’m planning on applying to for a post doc. This was pointed to me by Professor Gottlieb (Columbia University).
People
Dmitriy Aronov *
Studies memory to understand the way experience translates into action.
- Measures animals who have been put into VR
One way his lab does this is by putting rats in virtual reality environments and recording their brain activity. In a typical experiment, he places a rat on a spherical treadmill — picture a computer trackball — surrounded by a projection of a room. Based on current context and recollections of past experiences, the rat figures out where to run to receive a treat of sugar water. Meanwhile, Dr. Aronov records the firing of the rats’ neurons (a type of brain cell) in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, two brain areas responsible for memory. In this way Dr. Aronov can control exactly what the animal sees and measure exactly what it does, while simultaneously observing how its brain operates.
- Developing future technologies to compare rats (generalists) with bird species (tends to be more specialized)
In addition to Dr. Aronov’s work with rats, he is developing technologies for monitoring the thoughts of birds in the lab. Rats, he says, are generalists, fairly good at many different tasks. So he wants to look at an animal that’s a genius at a particular behavior, and he has settled on the black-capped chickadee. This bird can hide thousands of pieces of food in a day and know exactly where to find them later. Just like us, the bird is constantly retrieving various pieces of information from memory before acting. Its abilities might shed light on the amazing skills of humans to make complex decisions based on deep experience.
Rudy Behnia
Tries to understand how the brain interprets motion.
Andres Bendesky
Studies how genetics may play into exploration and whether there is a genetic link between various species, and how these genes are expressed through exploration.
Mark Churchland
Distinguish between voluntary and reactive movements.
Studying how the brain prepares for movement offers a peek at a computational process that is normally hidden from direct observation but that has immediate consequences, Dr. Churchland explains. “There’s just something intellectually satisfying about being able to study activity that’s both internal and abstract, yet is also tightly tied to behavior that as a scientist you can quantify and observe.”
Aniruddha Das *
Studies the anticipatory rush of blood that occurs in certain parts of the brain. Wonders how this can help explain anticipatory behavior, and how we prepare for upcoming events and are motivated to attend to different attributes.
Vincent P. Ferrera **
Vincent Ferrera studies attention and decision making. A main goal of his lab is to understand how the brain makes decisions when faced with incomplete information.
Stefano Fusi *
Stefano Fusi wants to design technology inspired by the human brain. As a step toward this goal, he is using math to better understand how the brain itself computes information, especially as related to problem solving, reasoning and decision-making.
One way he has tested the idea is by looking at brain activity recorded from the frontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for executive control, in animals while they perform a task. Using statistical analysis, he has found that when an animal responds correctly, populations of neurons show mixed selectivity and their responses are highly diverse, each responding to a different mixture of features. When the animal fails, the mixed selectivity component of the neural response is strongly reduced and significantly noisier. He has also used data that fellow Zuckerman Institute principal investigator Daniel Salzman, MD, PhD, has collected from the amygdala—a brain area central to emotion that is thought to be highly organized — and found a similar pattern.
Could be an interesting mentor. Working towards understanding how his observations relate to the agent’s ability to predict, or possibly how the agent acts after it fails in a task.
Elias Issa
Computational neuroscience, studies how visual inputs feed into intelligent judgments.
Nikolaus Kriegeskorte **
Does something similar to what Alona does, and sees how well deep networks can predict brain activity given a task.
Richard Mann *
Studies motor neurons and how the brain prepares motion.
Kenneth Miller
Uses mathematical models to study neuronal behavior.
Much of the experimental work he was reading focused on the visual cortex, one of the best-studied regions of the brain, which gives rise to our ability to see. So Dr. Miller started there. He found that mathematical models could help explain how cells in the brain develop the ability to identify the angle of a line seen by the eyes, for instance, or to favor information coming from one eye over the other, a phenomenon called ocular dominance.
Michael Shadlen
In his lab, Dr. Shadlen studies how we turn visual signals into behavior. He focuses on the brain’s parietal cortex, a region that acts as a go-between — linking areas that take in sensory input to those that prepare the body to act. People with damage to the parietal cortex exhibit trouble with various skills, from understanding numbers to knowing what objects are for, “so the parietal cortex seems like a great place to look for the seeds of higher brain function in general,” Dr. Shadlen says.
Daphna Shohamy **
Memories guide how we become who we are.
To study the neural processes by which memory and decision making interact, Dr. Shohamy puts people in a brain scanner and asks them to play computer games that test different kinds of behaviors. In one task, they draw from two different decks of cards; over time, the subjects learn that drawing from one deck offers a higher chance of winning over the other. In this way, Dr. Shohamy can observe which parts of the brain are active as people gradually form habits. Later, she might ask them to recall the picture on a winning deck, to see what was happening in the brain when they successfully remember and use specific episodic memories to perform the task.