Monday 3/2 Biology Seminar

Development and evolution of the neural crest in vertebrates.

Maria Elena de Bellar (Califonia State University, Northridge)

Monday, March 2nd, 12-1pm

Rm. 926, Hunter North

Friday 2/21 CNC Seminar: Peter Balsam

‘To go or not to go - Is that the question? The many faces of dopamine in learning and motivation.”

Peter Balsam (Barnard College - Columbia University)

Friday, February 21st, 10-11:30

The Graduate Center, Room 6496

Fifth Ave. and 34th Street

Friday, 12/6, Presenting our work @ SUNY Albany

I’m looking forward to sharing our work on circuit communication during fear suppression at SUNY Albany, where I will tie together our older and newer work on this topic. We look at circuit communication in fear suppression during discrimination of a non-threatening cue, extinction of a threatening cue, and safety learning in order to have a thorough understanding of neural processing in emotion regulation.

Sun. 10/20 & Tue 10/22 - Presenting our work at SFN

We’re off to the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago. If you’re at the meeting, you can find Becky presenting her collaborative work with Dr. Nesha Burghardt and our lab during Sunday’s morning poster session, and Carolina, Rebecca, and Itzik (showing his work done in collaboration with Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary’s lab) in Tuesday’s afternoon session.

October 20, 8am - 12pm

151.15 Serotonin input to the dorsal BNST contributes to sex differences in fear learning

R. Ravenelle, H. Yoon, E. Likhtik, N.S. Burghardt

Tuesday, October 22, 1-5pm

593.22 Infralimbic projections to the basal forebrain regulate fear extinction recall.

C. Fernandes-Henriques*, R. Zhang-Shen*, I. Grunfeld, M.B. Corniquel, N. Burney, S.X. Lei, M. Labkovich, D. Semidey, E. Likhtik

593.23 Auditory safety training improves novel auditory discrimination learning and sensory discrimination curves.

I. Nahmoud, J.G. Vasquez, H. Cho, T. Dennis-Tiwary, E. Likhtik

New paper out: Neuromodulation in circuits of aversive emotional learning

This month’s issue of Nature Neuroscience focuses on Learning and Memory, hitting a lot of nails on the head around this sprawling topic - from Brain Machine Interfaces, to links between pain processing and learning, to sleep, to development, neurogenesis, and mechanisms of memory retrieval. In our review paper with Joshua Johansen (Riken), we focus on the variety of roles that the neuromodulators acetylcholine, noradrenaline, and dopamine play in circuit function during aversive emotional learning. We discuss how these different neuromodulatory systems can increase the gain of a signal, improving signal-to-noise during learning, how their modular organization allows for context-dependent learning modes, and how their patterns of innervation can bind distal regions during learning, when circuit communication incorporates new patterns of activity.

Fig1NN2019.png

Friday 9/27 CNC Seminar - Salvatore Dura-Bernal, 10am

Data-driven multiscale modeling of cortical circuits, Salvatore Dura-Bernal (SUNY Downstate Medical Center)

The Graduate Center (34th St. & 5th Ave), Room 6304.01, 10-11:30am

SalvatorDuraBernal.jpg

Salvatore Dura-Bernal’s research focuses on understanding cortical circuits through large-scale biophysically-detailed simulations on supercomputers. He has developed the most detailed model of mouse primary motor cortex (M1) circuits by integrating experimental data available at multiple scales -- molecules, neurons, networks and systems. The model provides insights into cortical dynamics, physiological oscillations, information flow and molecular neuromodulatory mechanisms, which has helped develop new hypotheses and guide experimentation. He also developed a software tool (www.netpyne.org) for multiscale modeling of brain circuits. It has already been used worldwide in over 20 labs, to train students and to investigate different brain regions and phenomena. The tool can help to better understand neural brain function and disorders, and aid in developing novel pharmacological or neurostimulation treatments.