Speakers

We are extremely sad to announce that

the 9th edition of the Sense to Synapse meeting schedulled for Friday May 8th 2020

is now CANCELLED

We are currently working on rescheduling the event for later this year

(sometime in fall) and we will keep you updated!

Dmitriy Aronov (Columbia University)

Throughout the day, the brain captures snapshots of distinct, instantaneous experiences, forming 'episodic memories' that can last a lifetime. Dmitriy Aronov's lab studies the hippocampus to understand how circuits and patterns of neural activity implement this function. To do so, the lab is using unique model organisms: food-caching birds from the chickadee family. Chickadees cache large numbers of food items at scattered, hidden locations in their environment and use hippocampus-dependent memory to retrieve these caches later in time. The lab develops paradigms to study food caching in a laboratory setting and performs electrophysiological recordings, calcium imaging, anatomical analyses, as well as neural network modeling to understand this behavior.

Christine Constantinople (New York University)

The Constantinople lab is interested in understanding the circuit basis of neural computations guiding value-based decision-making. We draw inspiration from the field of behavioral economics, which provides a useful quantitative framework for describing how people subjectively assign value to outcomes, and use those value estimates to make decisions. Moreover, behavioral economics describes highly reproducible and interesting aspects of choice behavior, many of which are observable in rats. We use high-throughput behavioral training of rats, computational modeling, and the powerful experimental toolkit available in rodents for monitoring and manipulating neural circuits, to understand the neural circuit basis of these cognitive phenomena.

Daniel Kronauer (The Rockefeller University)

The members of Dr. Kronauer’s lab want to understand how insect societies have evolved and how they are organized. In particular, they are interested in how individuals respond to social cues on a molecular and behavioral level, and how local interactions between “simple” individuals give rise to complex group-level phenomena. They study these topics using ants as model systems, in the hope to gain novel insights into the fundamental mechanisms that underlie social behavior and biological complexity.

Erin Rich (Mount Sinai)

The Rich lab is interested in understanding the neural mechanisms that underlie higher cognitive functions, such as learning, memory and decision-making. These processes rely in part on the prefrontal cortex and its interactions with subcortical networks. Our goal is to understand the basic principles that organize function among these circuits, and how these may be disrupted by mental illness. To do this, we combine hypothesis-driven behavioral tasks, large-scale neurophysiological recordings, and computational modeling to map neural dynamics onto behavior. Current projects are focused on motivation, decision-making, working memory, and social cognition.