Faculty are listed by Department within their Research Areas,
with descriptions of their active projects.

DEPARTMENT OF BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING

HERBERT F. VOIGT
Professor, Biomedical Engineering; Associate Research Professor,
Otolaryngology, School of Medicine; PhD, Johns Hopkins University

Research Interests: Dr. Voigt is currently engaged in experimental and theoretical studies of the neuronal circuitry in the cochlear nucleus. He uses single- and multi-unit recording and analysis techniques to study the responses of neurons and neural nets to acoustic stimulation. Other interests include brainstem auditory evoked responses and neural modeling of the cochlear nucleus.

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DEPARTMENT OF COGNITIVE AND NEURAL SYSTEMS

DANIEL H. BULLOCK
Associate Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and
Psychology; PhD, Stanford University

Research Interests: Integrated neural network models of sensory-motor learning, planning and control. These neural network models encompass circuits in cortex, basal ganglia, cerebellum, and the spinal cord. Our studies focus on step-by-step reconstruction of known brain and CNS circuits within the context of a quantitative functional theory of adaptive behavior and cognition. Concepts and hypotheses are rigorously assessed by comprehensive computer simulations of neural circuits that are specified as systems of ordinary differential equations.

GAIL A. CARPENTER
Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and Mathematics;
PhD, University of Wisconsin

Research Interests: Development of neural network models for self-organizing category learning and pattern recognition; neural mechanisms of synaptic transmission and adaptation; and systems that incorporate these models into neural networks architectures for incremental supervised learning and prediction. Also: Neural models of vision, nerve impulse generation (Hodgkin-Huxley equations), transmitter dynamics, and biological rhythms.

MICHAEL A. COHEN
Associate Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and
Computer Science; PhD, Harvard University

Research Interests: Neural network models of speech and language processing. Stability and instability of dynamical systems underlying neural networks. Models of memory, language comprehension, and auditory psychoacoustics, statistical neural network models of depression, and cardiovascular control.

STEPHEN GROSSBERG
Wang Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems, Professor of
Mathematics, Psychology, and Biomedical Engineering; Director,
Center for Adaptive Systems; Chairman, Department of Cognitive and
Neural Systems; PhD, Rockefeller University

Research Interests: Development of neural models of learning, recognition, memory, vision, audition, speech, cognition, reinforcement, attention, adaptive sensory-motor control, and biological rhythms. Systematic analysis and prediction of behavioral and brain data in both normal and clinical patients. Applications to outstanding technological problems.

ENNIO MINGOLLA
Chair and Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and Psychology;Co-Director, Center for Excellence in Learning in Education, Science, and Technology. PhD, University of Connecticut.

Research Interests: Theoretical research includes design of neural network architectures for visual perception, including segmentation, completion, and grouping of static and moving boundaries, textures, and shaded regions. Empirical research includes psychophysical studies of human perception of visual motion, visual search, surface perception and object recognition.


ERIC L. SCHWARTZ
Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems, Electrical and
Computer Systems Engineering, and Anatomy and Neurobiology;
PhD, Columbia University

Research Interests: Computational neuroscience, space-variant vision, modeling of cortical map and column systems, spatial representation, computer-aided neuroanatomy, robotics, and VLSI.

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DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY

ALICE CRONIN-GOLOMB
Associate Professor; PhD, California Institute of Technology

Research Interests: Visual perception and cognition in normal aging and age-related neurodegenerative disorders. I am especially interested in the cortical mechanisms underlying perceptual deficits in Alzheimer's disease and related disorders (e.g., Down syndrome, Parkinson's disease), and in the causal relations between perceptual deficits and cognitive dysfunction.

HOWARD EICHENBAUM
University Professor and Director of Center for Neuroscience and the Center for Memory and Brain; PhD, University of Michigan.

Research Interests: My research involves explorations of the neural circuitry that mediates our capacities for cognition and memory. In particular, work in my lab focuses on the contributions of a system of brain structures including the hippocampus and cerebral cortex. Our approach to understanding this system entails a combination of neuropsychological testing to analyze how memory breaks down after selective damage to components of this system and electrophysiological recording to characterize how experiences are encoded by the activity patterns of neurons in these brain structures.

MICHAEL HASSELMO
Professor; DPhil, Oxford University

Research Interests: Research in the Hasselmo laboratory focuses on physiological and computational analysis of the mechanisms of memory function in mammalian cortical circuits, including the role of activation in muscarinic acetylcholine receptors and GABAB receptors, and the role of oscillatory dynamics in the olfactory cortex and hippocampus. Students in the laboratory have the opportunity to learn a wide range of neuroscience research techniques, including electrophysiological recording from brain slice preparations of the hippocampus and piriform cortex, recordings of evoked potentials and unit activity in anesthetized and chronic preparations, detailed compartmental biophysical simulations of cortical circuits, and behavioral studies of cholinergic modulation in olfactory behavior. Articles from this laboratory have been co-authored by numerous trainees, many of whom have performed both computational modeling work and physiological research while working in the laboratory.

KATHLEEN M. KANTAK
Professor; PhD, Syracuse University
Research Interests:My research uses animal models to conduct translational research related to drug addiction, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and their co-morbidity. Using intravenous drug self-administration procedures in rats, my lab investigates how multiple memory systems regulate drug-seeking and drug-taking behavior as well as how drug exposure influences the neurocognitive functioning of multiple memory systems. In addition, we investigate how cognitive-enhancing therapeutics may be useful to facilitate extinction learning for cues predictive of drug availability and if such treatment can attenuate drug relapse. Other studies focus on evaluating neurocognitive deficits of the frontal and medial temporal lobes as well as the striatum in rats with an ADHD phenotype and their response to medications. We have begun investigating comorbidity between ADHD and vulnerability to drug addiction and to determine if medications (stimulant and non-stimulant) increase or decrease this vulnerability. In the context of all this research, I collaborate with other investigators to conduct parallel studies in non-human primates, to perform image analysis or to understand the neurochemical and molecular correlates of these disorders and their treatment.

JACQUELINE A. LIEDERMAN
Associate Professor; PhD, University of Rochester

Research Interests: Mechanisms underlying interhemispheric collaboration during information processing; endocrinological and immunological mechanisms underlying male prevalence for neurodevelopmental disorders and lefthandedness; the effects of environmental estrogens on the developing brain.

HENRY MARCUCELLA
Professor; PhD, Boston University

Research Interests: Conditioning and learning; behavioral pharmacology; drugs as reinforcers with particular interest in alcohol self-administration.

DAVID I. MOSTOFSKY
Professor; PhD, Boston University

Research Interests: Application of conditioning and learning to behavioral medicine, particularly problems of epilepsy, pain, and aging; anticonvulsant effects on behavior; chronic fatigue syndrome.

MICHELE RUCCI
Associate Professor of Psychology; PhD, Scuola Superiore S. Anna, Pisa, Italy.

 Research Interests: Research in my laboratory (The Active Perception Lab) focuses on active perception in biological and artificial systems. Experimental and theoretical approaches are combined to examine motor influences on perceptual performance and on the encoding of sensory information in the brain. Robots replicating the sensory-motor strategies of various species are studied in an effort to develop efficient machine perception systems. Research in the Active Perception Laboratory has raised specific hypotheses regarding the influences of eye movements during visual development and in the neural encoding of visual information. This research has also demonstrated the involvement of fixational eye movements in fine spatial vision, produced a new system for experimental studies of visual neuroscience, and led to the development of robots directly controlled by models of the brain.

DAVID SOMERS
Assistant Professor; PhD, Boston University

Research Interests: My research investigates the neural mechanisms of visual perception and attention. These investigations take place at three levels of analysis: investigating perceptual function; mapping perceptual function onto brain structures; and studying the computational architecture of the underlying neural mechanisms. In pursuing these goals, three primary techniques are employed: traditional human visual psychophysics; functional magnetic resonance imaging of human brain activity during visual perceptual and attentional tasks; and computational modeling of visual cortical circuitry. Current specific topics of interest include visual spatial attention, visual motion perception, lightness perception, and neural computations in primary visual cortex.

CHANTAL E. STERN
Professor of Psychology; DPhil, Oxford University

Research Interests: Research in the Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory at Boston University is focused on using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study memory and cognition. The long-term objective of the laboratory is to elucidate the neural substrates underlying memory processing in the normal human brain, and to extend these finding to study changes in memory functioning in normal aging, Alzheimer's disease, and AIDS-related dementia. An additional goal is to integrate the fMRI studies of human memory processing with knowledge from animal models and computational modeling (Eichenbaum and Hasselmo laboratories). Recent work includes fMRI studies of prefrontal and medial temporal lobe interactions in picture and word encoding, examining the role of prefrontal and medial temporal lobe contributions to working memory for spatial, non-spatial, and complex visual stimuli, and studies combining cognitive, physiological and morphometric methods to examine changes associated with aging. Imaging is carried out at the Massachusetts General Hospital-NMR Center. Students and postdoctoral fellows are provided with training in cognitive neuroscience, neuroanatomy, block design and event-related fMRI, cortical inflation and flattening techniques, and cortical parcellation techniques. In 1999, installation of MEG facilities at the MGH-NMR Center further enhanced available research opportunities.

TAKEO WATANABE
Associate Professor; PhD, University of Tokyo

Research Interests:Visual perception and attention by means of visual psychophysics and f-MRI technique. Specific emphasis is effects of attention on motion processing.

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