Neuroscientists Talk Shop

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Kamran Khodakhah (Professor, Albert Einstein College of Medicine) talks with the group about information coding in cerebellar cortex and his foray  into translational research with a model of rapid onset dystonia.  The  group discusses the current NIH push for translational research at the  expense of basic science and debates the idea of cerebellum as a motor learning structure.

Duration: 45 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

James Bower (Prof, UTSA/UTHSCSA)

Carlos Paladini (Assoc. Prof UTSA)

Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA)

Fidel Santamaria (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Todd Troyer (Prof, UTSA)

acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Helen Scharfman (Professor, NYU Langone School of Medicine) talks about aberrant neurogenesis following seizure activity in the dentate gyrus, and discusses models of how newly born granule cells may aid in information storage and retrieval in memory process.

Duration: 45 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA)

Brian Derrick (Prof, UTSA)

Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA)

acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Philip Sabes (Associate Professor, UCSF) talks about modeling complex behaviors that remain relevant and specifically tailored to the  physiology of real neurons and neural circuits in real time.

Duration: 45 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA)

Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Nicole Wicha (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA)

acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Thomas Blanpied (Assistant Professor, University of Maryland School of  Medicine) talks about molecular organization at the post-synaptic density, models of receptor mobility, and visualization of living synapses in real time.

Duration: 45 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA)

Brian Derrick (Prof, UTSA)

Fidel Santamaria (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA)

acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

David McCormick (Dorys McConnel Duberg Professor of Neurobiology, Yale School of Medicine) talks about flexibility of information coding in neural systems, and the complexity of undertaking studies of functional connectivity in cortical networks.

Duration: 40 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Joseph Beatty (Post-doc, UTSA)

Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA)

Soomin Song (PhD Student, UTSA)

Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA)

acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Kara Federmeier (Associate Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) talks about prediction in language production and comprehension, and how ERPs are used to reveal differences in the time course and components of language processing.  Also discussed are the N400 as a measure of meaning, and general principles of language lateralization.

Duration: 43 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA)

Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Nicole Wicha (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA)

acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Anne Young (Julianne Dorn Professor of Neurology, Harvard MGH) talks about her early studies of basal ganglia functional anatomy, and how they led  to her famed dual pathway model of the basal ganglia.  The group muses on the model's strengths and shortcomings over the decades, and discusses how it organized thinking in the field of basal ganglia research and continues to be relevant to clinicians and researchers today.

Duration: 41 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Carlos Paladini (Assoc Prof, UTSA)

George Perry (Dean, College of Science UTSA)

Salma Quraishi (Res Asst Prof, UTSA)

Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA, UTHSCSA)

acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Dieter Jaeger (Professor, Emory University) talks about the complexity of modeling systems whose biological function is ill-defined, and how to determine how complex a model needs to be.  The possibility of building structured queryable databases for mining neuroscience data is  discussed, as are thoughts on mouse model systems as an approximation of  the human brain.

Duration: 41 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Salma Quraishi (Res Asst Prof, UTSA)

Fidel Santamaria (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA, UTHSCSA)

acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Rama Ratnam hosts William Brownell (The Jake and Nina Kamin Chair of Otolaryngology and  Head and Neck Surgery, Baylor College of Medicine) as he discusses electromechanical signal processing in the cochlea.  Electromotility in  the nervous system is discussed, specifically in the context of cochlear amplification.

Duration: 47 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Rama Ratnam (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA)

acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Thomas Cleland (Cornell University) discusses the idea of olfactory receptive fields, and the problems associated with compressing the high-dimensional parameters of odor space into two-dimensional brain space.  Analogies to the retina are considered.

Duration: 41 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Carlos Paladini (Assoc Prof, UTSA)

Salma Quraishi (Res. Asst Prof, UTSA)

Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA)

acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.