Thursday Jan 16th:
15.15-15.45 Professor Stefano Vassanelli: Connecting artificial and brain neurons by high-density neural interfaces and memristive synapses
15.50-16.20 Assistant Professor Nick Steinmetz, Title to be announced soon.
Stefano Vassanelli
(http://pnc.unipd.it/stefano-vassanelli/) is professor of Neurophysiology at the University of Padova, Dept. of Biomedical Sciences and Padua Neuroscience Center, and leader of the NeuroChip laboratory. His main research focus is the development of novel probes and AI technologies for brain-machine interfacing and for the investigation of information processing in brain microcircuits. He is currently coordinating the SYNCH project founded by the European Commission under the H2020 FET Proactive programme aiming at the creation of a hybrid biological-artificial neural architecture with memristive plasticity in vivo.
Nick Steimetz Steimetz
(https://depts.washington.edu/biostr/people/steinmetz-nick) is assistant professor at University of Washington, USA. In his research he focuses on understanding neural circuits that underlie perception and cognition across the brain. In his lab, he has been in the forefront developing large-scale recording systems for neural activity in the brain, NeuroPixels, which is about to revolutionize the way neural recordings can be conducted, generating a detailed and representative ensemble of the neuron population in focus. Steinmetz combines these recordings with neural perturbation and developing analysing tools. This is in line with the focus of Buccino’s thesis where he has developed novel tools to analyse the data obtained with NeuroPixels and modelling reconstructed neurons to understand what is being measured.
Buns and coffee will be provided.
Friday January 17th:
Stefano and Nick will act as opponents for the PhD dissertation of Alessio Buccino. You are all most welcome to the events:
10.15: Trial lecture entitled: Investigating activity of neuronal populations in vivo: challenges and opportunities for combining electrophysiology with other modalities".
13.15: Alessio will defend his thesis: “A computationally-assisted approach to neural extracellular electrophysiology with multi-electrode arrays”
Evaluating Committee: Professor Stefano Vassanelli, Assistant Professor Nick Steinmetz and Associate Professor Kyrre Glette.