The Diedrichsen Lab is looking to recruit a new postdoctoral associate with interest in studying the human cerebellum. The successful candidate will join an inter-disciplinary research group that uses behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational approaches to investigate the role of the cerebellum in motor control, cognition, and language. Our approach is to use Big Data and Machine Learning to gain insight about the overall functional organization of the cerebellum, which then informs targeted imaging and behavioural experiments. The enthusiastic and supportive environment will enable the candidate to develop their own research program.

The Department of Psychology at UC San Diego invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position focused on computational and theoretical mechanisms of behavior and/or its neural bases. The selected candidate will be responsible for establishing a rigorous, high-quality research program that complements existing departmental strengths in Behavioral Neuroscience, Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and/or Social Psychology. Additional responsibilities include teaching graduate and undergraduate level courses and mentoring students within the Department of Psychology, as well as participating in department and university service.

Epilepsy is a common and disabling neurologic condition affecting adults and children that results from complex dysfunction of neural networks and is ineffectively treated with current therapies in up to one third of patients. This dysfunction can have especially severe consequences in pediatric age group, where neurodevelopment may be irreversibly affected. Furthermore, although seizures are the most obvious manifestation of epilepsy, the cognitive and psychiatric dysfunction that often coexists in patients with this disorder has the potential to be equally disabling.  Given these challenges, her research program aims to better understand how epileptic activity disrupts the proper development and function of neural networks, with the overall goal of identifying novel biomarkers and systems level treatments for epileptic disorders and their comorbidities, especially those affecting children.

Connections between nerve cells called synapses are the fundamental units of communication and information processing in the brain. The accurate wiring of neurons through synapses into neural networks or circuits is essential for brain organization. Neuronal networks are sculpted and refined throughout life by constant adjustment of the strength of synaptic communication by neuronal activity, a process known as synaptic plasticity. Deficits in the development or plasticity of synapses underlie various neuropsychiatric disorders, including autism, schizophrenia and intellectual disability. The Siddiqui lab research program comprises three major themes. One, to assess how biochemical switches control the activity of synapse organizing proteins, how these switches act through their binding partners and how these processes are regulated to correct impaired synaptic function in disease. Two, to investigate how synapse organizers regulate the specificity of neuronal circuit development and how defined circuits contribute to cognition and behaviour. Three, to address how synapses are formed in the developing brain and maintained in the mature brain and how microcircuits formed by synapses are refined to fine-tune information processing in the brain. Together, these studies have generated fundamental new knowledge about neuronal circuit development and plasticity and enabled us to identify targets for therapeutic intervention.

The human brain is a complex network of neuronal connections. The precise arrangement of these connections, otherwise known as the topology of the network, is crucial to its functioning. Recent efforts to understand how the complex topology of the brain has emerged have used generative mathematical models, which grow synthetic networks according to specific wiring rules. Evidence suggests that a wiring rule which emulates a trade-off between connection costs and functional benefits can produce networks that capture essential topological properties of brain networks. In this webinar, Professor Alex Fornito and Dr Stuart Oldham will discuss these previous findings, as well as their own efforts in creating more physiologically constrained generative models. Professor Alex Fornito is Head of the Brain Mapping and Modelling Research Program at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health. His research focuses on developing new imaging techniques for mapping human brain connectivity and applying these methods to shed light on brain function in health and disease. Dr Stuart Oldham is a Research Fellow at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health and a Research Officer at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. He is interested in characterising the organisation of human brain networks, with particular focus on how this organisation develops, using neuroimaging and computational tools.

Foraging research aims at describing, understanding, and predicting resource-gathering behaviour. Optimal Foraging Theory (OFT) is a sub-discipline that emphasises that these aims can be aided by segmenting foraging behaviour into discrete problems that can be formally described and examined with mathematical maximization techniques. Examples of such segmentation are found in the isolated treatment of issues such as patch residence time, prey selection, information gathering, risky choice, intertemporal decision making, resource allocation, competition, memory updating, group structure, and so on. Since foragers face these problems simultaneously rather than in isolation, it is unsurprising that OFT models are ‘always wrong but sometimes useful’. I will argue that a progressive optimal foraging research program should have a defined strategy for dealing with predictive failure of models. Further, I will caution against searching for brain structures responsible for solving isolated foraging problems.

What happens when the nervous system fails to adapt? Our perception of the world relies on a nervous system that learns and adapts to sensory information. Based on our experience we can predict what a wooden surface will feel like, that fire is hot, and that a gentle caress from a partner can be soothing. But our sensory experience of the world is not static – warm water can feel like fire on sunburned skin and the gentle brush of our clothes can be excruciating after an injury. In pathological conditions such as chronic pain, changes in nervous system function can cause normally innocuous sensory stimuli to be perceived as aversive or painful long after the initial injury has happened. These changes can sometimes be similar to the formation of a pain ‘memory’ that can modulate and distort our perception of sensory information. Our research program seeks to understand how fundamental processes that govern the formation and maintenance of plastic changes in the nervous system can lead to pathological conditions and how we can reverse engineer these changes to treat chronic conditions.