This Presidential Faculty Fellow award funds research and teaching activity of a neuroscientist. Research concentrates on how large assemblies of neurons function, using as an the retina of the eye as a model system to study the complex interactions for collective signaling. Novel instrumentation is used to monitor the simultaneous activity of many nerve cells at once, to determine how a visual image is processed into a signal to be sent to the brain by neural pathways to visual centers. The role of correlated neural activity also appears to be important in development of a properly functional retina, and these studies explore how such mechanisms may be important in the adult retina. Teaching emphasizes to undergraduates and to graduates how the nervous system acts to integrate complex functions, with an outreach component into the local high schools. The impact of this project will be strong on visual neuroscience and computational neuroscience, and likely to other areas of brain information processing; the teaching component will be important to the scientific development of students over a wide range of ages and potential careers.
