Jeffrey Gavornik

Assistant Professor, Cortical Circuits & Synaptic Plasticity

  • Title Assistant Professor, Cortical Circuits & Synaptic Plasticity
  • Phone 617-358-0444
  • Education PhD, University of Texas at Austin, 2009

Current Research

The basis of all cognitive function is communication between neurons in the brain. This communication is mediated by synaptic connections that are modified by experience to encode function. In order to get at the big question of “how the brain works”, I study how experience driven synaptic plasticity changes local neocortical physiology. I am particularly interested in how neural circuits are able to incorporate past experience to predictively represent spatiotemporal information.

Employing a variety of experimental and computational approaches, my lab examines how the cortical response to specific sensory stimuli change as a consequence of learning. We the use primary sensory cortices, particularly the visual cortex, as relatively accessible and interpretable regions in which to isolate the core biology responsible for coding higher-order information in less accessible neocortical areas. The goal is to elucidate the mechanistic bases of cortical processing algorithms and memory storage.

Selected Publications

  • Gavornik JP and Bear MF (2014) Learned spatiotemporal sequence recognition and prediction in the primary visual cortex Nat Neurosci17(5) 732-737.
  • Shouval HZ, Hussain Shuler MG, Agarwal A, Gavornik JP (2014) What does scalar timing tell us about neural dynamics? Front Hum Neurosci 8(438).
  • Melom J, Akbergenova Y, Gavornik JP and Littleton JT (2013) Spontaneous and evoked release are independently regulated at individual active zones. J Neurosci33(44) 17253-17263.
  • Shouval HZ, Agarwal A, Gavornik JP (2013) Scaling of perceptual errors can predict the shape of neural tuning curves. Phys Rev Lett 110(16):168102.
  • Gavornik JP, Shouval HZ. (2011) A network of spiking neurons that can represent interval timing: mean feld analysis. J Comput Neurosci 30(2) 501-13.
  • Coleman J, Nahmani M, Gavornik JP, Haslinger R, Heynen A, Bear MF and Erisir A (2010) Rapid structural remodeling of thalamocortical synapses parallels experience-dependent functional plasticity in mouse primary visual cortex. J Neurosci 30(29) 9670-82.
  • Gavornik JP, Shuler MGH, Loewenstein Y, Bear MF and Shouval, HZ (2009) Learning reward timing in cortex through reward dependent expression of synaptic plasticity. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 106(16):6826-31.

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