MIT Colloquium on Brain & Cognition with Dr. Lisa Giocomo
Description
Over the last few decades, the tractable response properties of medial entorhinal neurons have provided a new access key to understanding the cognitive process of self-localization: the ability to know where you are currently located in space. Defined by functionally discrete response properties, neurons in the medial entorhinal cortex are proposed to provide the basis for an internal neural map of space and enable animals to perform path-integration based spatial navigation. My lab focuses on leveraging this system to understand how external sensory inputs meld with internal computations to generate neural codes capable of supporting spatial cognition. In this talk, I'll discuss ongoing work aimed at discovering how sensory inputs calibrate self-motion signals, as well as work that has recently revealed how behavioral state adaptively changes the previously proposed static path-integration mode of medial entorhinal cortex.
Speaker Bio
Lisa M Giocomo worked with Dr. Michael Hasselmo for her graduate studies and received her PhD in Neuroscience from Boston University in 2008. She was then a postdoctoral fellow with Edvard and May-Britt Moser at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology from 2009-2012. In 2013, she started as an Assistant Professor of Neurobiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Her lab integrates electrophysiology, behavior, gene manipulations, two photon imaging and computational modeling to study how single-cell biophysics and network dynamics interact to mediate spatial memory and navigation. Lisa serves as an advisor as part of the Allen Institute for Brain Science Next Generation Leaders and was named a Gabilan Fellow at Stanford University in 2013. She received the Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award in 2012, was named a Sloan Research Fellow in 2013, a Klingenstein-Simons Fellow in 2014, New York Stem Cell Foundation Investigator in 2014, and a James S McDonnell Scholar in 2016.