**Faculty Candidate Search **

Experiments are revealing the structure and dynamics of brain circuits in unprecedented detail. Coordinated theoretical progress is needed to transform these data into hypotheses, theories, and principles of brain function. In this talk, I will describe three research directions that illustrate distinct ways that theory can facilitate discovery and understanding in neurobiology.

First, I will discuss my work on dendritic spine dynamics to illustrate how theory can enable the inference of biologically meaningful quantities from indirect and noisy measurements. These results reveal synaptic dynamics in the mouse hippocampus that illuminate the hippocampus’ function as a temporary repository of memory. Second, I will describe my research on sensorimotor transformations to illustrate how theory can synthesize and distill complex biological data. This project provides a working whole-brain circuit model of the zebrafish optomotor response and identifies the features of heterogeneous neural responses that critically contribute to the measured visuomotor transformation. Finally, I will introduce my studies on visual motion estimation to illustrate how theory can generate predictive frameworks that drive experimental research. This work considers the computational demands of accurate motion estimation in natural environments to decipher visual circuitry and predict non-canonical motion computations that contribute to motion estimation in fly and human brains.

These studies collectively envision a unified theoretical and experimental frontier of neuroscience that quantitatively links empirical phenomena spanning multiple spatial and temporal scales. Progress at this frontier will be critical towards understanding the relevant complexity of multiscale brains.