**Faculty Candidate - Systems Neuroscience**

Cognition can be conceptualized as a set of control functions whose precise engagement determines how an organism stores and uses information to guide thought and action. A subset of these functions is required for goal-directed selection and amplification of sensory signals, broadly referred to as ‘attention’, its flexible control and its interaction with processes such as working memory and decision making. While the contribution of recurrent cortical microcircuits to cognition has been extensively studied, the role of thalamus is just beginning to be elucidated. Here, I will present recent studies from my lab showing how the thalamus contributes to attentional control. I introduce a novel framework in which thalamic structural diversity generates multiple control functions, including high-fidelity information relay to or between cortical regions and the maintenance of functional cortical connectivity through temporal coordination or synaptic amplification. This framework emphasizes the distributed nature of cognitive control by relating it to thalamo-cortical operations that are functionally diverse and spatially segregated. Not only does this framework expands the role of thalamic engagement in cognition, but it also provides a roadmap for discovering new thalamic functions in the future.