The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Steve Lisberger, Ph.D., George Barth Geller Professor and chair, department of neurobiology, Duke University School of Medicine; investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Speaker bio(s)

Cellular plasticity is the event that occurs inside the brain when we learn something. Dr. Lisberger will demonstrate a link from a specific form of plasticity to learning in behaving, learning animals. His research uses smooth pursuit eye movements in primates to study the operation of the cerebellum during motor learning. The theory of cerebellar learning relies on motor errors signaled by climbing-fiber inputs to cause long-term depression of synapses from parallel fibers to Purkinje cells. Dr. Lisberger will describe how the cerebellar learning theory has been transformed into a cerebellar learning reality. His work has shown that a climbing fiber input on one behavioral trial is linked to a depression of Purkinje cell output on the following trial, and that plasticity is graded through modulation of the duration of the climbing fiber inputs. Dr. Lisberger believes that these findings are the product of short-term cellular plasticity caused by the climbing fiber input. Short-term plasticity and/or learning strongly facilitate long-term learning, and the climbing fiber input to the cerebellum plays a primary role in motor learning.

 

Dr. Lisberger earned his Ph.D. at the University of Washington and did postdoctoral work at the University of Munich and the National Institutes of Health. At the University of California, San Francisco, from 1981 to 2012, Dr. Lisberger was a professor of physiology, the founding director of the W.M. Keck Foundation Center for Integrative Neuroscience and a co-director of the Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology. He joined Duke University as professor and chair in the department of neurobiology in 2011. Among his honors are the Young Investigator Prize from the Society for Neuroscience in 1986 and the Bernice Grafstein Prize for achievements in mentoring woman in neuroscience in 2011. Dr. Lisberger was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008. , He was a section editor and a senior editor for the Journal of Neuroscience over an 11-year span, and has been the chief editor of Neuroscience since 2010. He is also the treasurer of the Society for Neuroscience.

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=3332