Neuroscientists Talk Shop

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Dwight Bergles (Johns Hopkins) discusses his work characterizing a fourth mysterious class of CNS glial cells, called oligodendrocyte precursor cells...

Thursday, February 8, 2018

Marco Gallio (Northwestern) talks about temperature sensation in Drosophila as a “fruitful” model system for examining sensory encoding and propagation of representations through a relatively reduced sensorimotor system...

Friday, February 9, 2018

Recorded as a panel discussion following the UTSA Neurosciences Institute’s 2018 research symposium.  The group discusses the tripartite synapse concept, which was coined by two of our panelists, Phil Haydon and Alfonso Araque, in the late 1990s.  The group considers the diverse mechanisms of astrocyte-neuron communication and the magnitude of how we are beginning to redefine the neural circuits of behavior and disease based on this new framework...

Thursday, February 22, 2018

Ed Stern (Bar-Ilan University, Israel) discusses corticostriatal networks in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease.

Duration: 42 minutes

Discussants:(in alphabetical order)

Alfonso Apicella (Asst Prof, UTSA)

Salma Quraishi (Res Asst Prof, UTSA)

Charles Wilson (Ewing Halsell Chair, UTSA)

acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.

Thursday, March 1, 2018

John Mantsch (Marquette University) discusses various animal models of drug relapse that differentiate aspects of how stress impinges on reward circuits to promote drug seeking...

Thursday, March 22, 2018

Ulrich Hofmann (Freiburg University) discusses the priorities and realities in implementing control theory, computational models and engineering principles to build implantable devices that can read and write to the nervous system as an approach for treating CNS disorders like paralysis, epilepsy, depression, and others...

Thursday, September 27, 2018

Chip Gerfen (NIMH) talks about his defining work in describing the input-output organization of the basal ganglia, and how early ideas of pathway-level organization principles have yielded an appreciation of the explosive anatomical and molecular diversity of individual neurons within those pathways...

Thursday, October 4, 2018

Marisela Morales (NIDA) discusses the anatomical and functional complexity of VTA projections, including the distinctive synaptic architecture of dual GABAergic glutamatergic synapses in the habenula, and the indispensability of electron microscopy for understanding the diversity of brain circuits...

Thursday, October 25, 2018

Josh Dudman (HHMI Janelia) discusses his model of how the basal ganglia shape performance based on prior experience by controlling the gain of movement kinematics.  The group considers this history-dependent gain computation model alongside the traditional action selection model...

Thursday, November 1, 2018

Maurice Chacron (McGill) talks about optimal coding mechanisms invoked in sensory perception of the electric fish.  He discusses his “awake behaving” model, through which he has deciphered that feedback from descending inputs tunes sensory responses through a “temporal whitening” function which may be conserved across species...