Abstract: How are environmental stimuli encoded in neural activity and how does this activity translate into perception? These are key questions towards one of Neuroscience’s fundamental goals: understanding how neural circuit activity mediates behavior. Recent experimental advances approaches are helping to shed light on the identity and timing of activated neurons that correlate with external sensory, as well as on which activity features are consequential for perception. In this talk, I will highlight recent advances in neurophotonics and in closely related acoustic techniques that can achieve highly precise manipulation and imaging of neural activity at different spatial scales: from single neurons to an entire brain. Together with ‘synthetic perception’ behavioral techniques these advances provide a new handle on this classical systems neuroscience problem. I will demonstrate how we use this strategy towards the dissection of computations underlying olfactory perception and the underlying circuit computations. Finally, I will show how we use state-of-the-art tools to better understand the nature of direct physical interactions with neural circuits.

Bio: Shy Shoham is the co-director of NYU’s Tech4Health Institute. He is a Professor of Neuroscience and Ophthalmology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, and an associated Professor of Biomedical Engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. His lab develops and applies photonic, acoustic, and computational tools for bi-directional neural interfacing. He holds a Physics BSc from Tel-Aviv University, a Biomedical Engineering PhD from the University of Utah, and was a Lewis-Thomas postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. He serves on the editorial boards of SPIE Neurophotonics, Journal of Neural Engineering, and Translational Vision Sci. & Technology, and has co-edited the Handbook of Neurophotonics.

Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81438777812?pwd=VfUbYTUYnTdW3KDQ2JCAP08toFHE9A.1

Note that students enrolled in the seminar series are expected to attend in person.