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Robert Haslinger, PhD
Instructor in Radiology at Harvard Medical School
Assistant in Neuroscience at Massachusetts General Hospital
Department of Radiology, MGH
PhD, University of Wisconsin
Building 149, Room 2301
13th Street
Charlestown, MA 02129
Phone:
Fax: 617-726-7422
Location:
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DESCRIPTION OF WORK / BIOSKETCH
My research focuses on how neurons in
the brain communicate and act
collectively to achieve perception and cognition. Organisms can
reliably perceive sensory stimuli and quickly compute appropriate
behavior to ensure their survival despite individual neurons being
extremely noisy. Such robust computation must therefore rely on the
coordinated, collective activity of many neurons, but this has been
difficult to investigate. Recent experimental advances, which allow the
activity of hundreds of neurons to be simultaneously recorded, have
provided a new opportunity to study how large neuronal networks
coordinate their member neurons’ activity.
The present challenge in
examining such complex data is in developing
new computational tools to analyze it and identify the collective
dynamics relevant for cognitive processing. Towards this end I use
techniques from statistics, complex systems and machine learning to
develop practical analysis methodologies that can extract, from neural
activity recorded in behaving animals, the collective dynamics that
neuronal networks use to process information. In collaboration with
co-PIs who perform animal experiments, I have applied these methods to
a wide variety of neural systems to determine how real neuronal
networks compute. I also research theoretical models of information
processing and computation by complexly structured neural activity.
Such work aims to provide a theoretical framework to identify and
explain common computational principles underlying apparently diverse
cortical areas and functions.
LINKS
personal research page
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