My research concerns how complex cognitive and perceptual phenomena can arise from, and be regulated by, cellular and neural circuit properties. Primarily using the sense of smell (olfaction), my students, colleagues, and I ask how learning, memory, expectation, and like processes shape the transformations performed on sensory inputs within relatively peripheral (i.e., experimentally accessible) cortical circuitry, and how these different transformations in turn influence behavior and subsequent learning. We triangulate on these questions using a range of techniques including electrophysiology, pharmacology, behavior and behavior genetics, the three-dimensional imaging of optically cleared brain tissue, and theoretical studies including biophysically constrained computational modeling and the elucidation of brain-inspired algorithms for implementation in neuromorphic hardware.
- My faculty page at the Department of Psychology
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- Find me at Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, or Frontiers
- Listen to my 2011 podcast on high-dimensional olfactory receptive fields, narrowcast from UTSA
- Information on the statistics requirement for the Cornell Psychology major. The recommended course is Statistics and Research Design (PSYCH 2500), the 4-credit version of which also includes instruction in the statistical analysis language R and its IDE RStudio.