The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Edvard Moser, Ph.D., co-director, Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience; professor, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

May-Britt Moser, Ph.D., co-director, Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience; professor, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Speaker bio(s)

The medial entorhinal cortex is part of the brain’s circuit for dynamic representation of self-location. The metric of this representation is provided by grid cells, cells with spatial firing fields that tile environments in a periodic hexagonal pattern. The first lecture (presented by Edvard Moser) will focus on how grid cells are organized within the medial entorhinal cortex. Based on recordings from large numbers of grid cells in individual rats, it has been found that grid cells cluster into a small number of layer-spanning, anatomically overlapping, functionally independent modules with distinct scale and orientation. This raises the possibility that the hexagonal activity patterns of grid cells emerge as stable solutions during competitive network interactions in recurrent inhibitory circuits of the medial entorhinal cortex. The second lecture (presented by May-Britt Moser) will involve how inputs from grid cells and other functional cell types determine properties of place cells in the hippocampus. Using a combination of electrophysiological and optogenetic techniques, the researchers found that the CA1 of the hippocampus receives input from a variety of sources, including border cells and head direction cells in the medial entorhinal cortex, odor-responsive cells in the lateral entorhinal cortex and, via the nucleus reuniens, decision-correlated cells in the medial prefrontal cortex. Collectively these inputs may be enable high-capacity memory in ensembles of place cells in the hippocampus.

May-Britt and Edvard Moser are interested in the neural basis of spatial location and spatial memory and try to use mammalian space circuits as a window to understanding cortical computation more generally. The Mosers received their initial training at the University of Oslo under the supervision of Per Andersen. They received further training with Richard Morris and John O’Keefe and accepted faculty professorships at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in 1996. In 2002, the Mosers became founding directors of the Centre for the Biology of Memory, a Norwegian Research Council-funded Centre of Excellence. In 2007 the Centre became a Kavli Institute, and in 2013 a new institute, the Centre for Neural Computation, was inaugurated. Joint honors include the W. Alden Spencer Award, the Koetser Award, the Bettencourt Prize for Life Sciences, Erik Fernström’s Great Nordic Prize, the Louis Jeantet Prize, Anders Jahre’s Great Nordic Prize in 2011 and the Perl/UNC Neuroscience Prize.

Open to

Public

Reception

Refreshments, 3:15 p.m. - 3:45 p.m., Abby Lounge

Contact

Alena Powell

Phone

(212) 327-7745

Sponsor

Alena Powell
(212) 327-7745
apowell@rockefeller.edu

Readings

http://librarynews.rockefeller.edu/?p=3314