When: Friday, June 27, 7:30 p.m.

Where: Singleton Room Roberts Hall

Terrence Sejnowski, Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Professor, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies,

IGERT Research Symposium: Keynote Address

Abstract:
Brains are never at rest. Even in the absence of sensory stimuli, neurons are spontaneously active and can fire coherently. Experiments and models suggest that these coherent patterns are modulated by top-down influences that allow us to expect, attend and flexibly respond. In particular, the inhibitory interneurons in the cortex may control the degree of synchrony in a cortical column and thereby control the gain of the signals represented by this population of neurons.

Speaker Bio:
Terrence Sejnowski is an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Professor at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory. He is also Professor of Biology and Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Physics, Neurosciences, Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where he is Director of the Institute for Neural Computation. Dr. Sejnowski received a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University and trained in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. The long-range goal Dr. Sejnowski's research is to build linking principles from brain to behavior using computational models. This goal is being pursued with a combination of theoretical and experimental approaches at several levels of investigation ranging from the biophysical level to the systems level. His laboratory has developed new methods for analyzing the sources for electrical and magnetic signals recorded from the scalp and hemodynamic signals from functional brain imaging. Dr. Sejnowski has received several awards including a Presidential Young Investigator Award, the Wright Prize from the Harvey Mudd College for excellence in interdisciplinary research, the Neural Network Pioneer Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and was elected a Fellow in the Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars.

The IGERT Student Research Symposium 2003 is hosted by the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh.

The SCS Community is invited to attend this talk.

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