Faculty

Center for Memory and Brain

Core Faculty:

A central requirement of the program is a critical mass of core CMB faculty who are well established experts in this area, who share research interests, complement one another in techniques, represent a continuity of levels of analysis, and who are geographically contiguous in location to facilitate daily interaction.

Howard Eichenbaum, Director, Professor of Psychological Sciences, University Professor, is an internationally recognized leader in neuropsychology of memory in animals and characterization of memory coding properties of neurons.

Michael Hasselmo, Professor of Psychological Sciences, is an internationally known leader in  computational and experimental analyses of neural circuits that mediate memory and in the pharmacology of memory.

Nancy Kopell, Professor of Mathematics, is an expert on neural dynamics, and is especially interested in neural rhythms and their functions.

Chantal E Stern, Professor of Psychological Sciences and faculty member at the MGH-NMR Center, is an expert in human brain imaging of memory systems.

The core faculty already has a track record of collaborative research. Eichenbaum has co-authored papers separately with Stern, and Hasselmo, and Eichenbaum and Hasselmo share a postdoctoral fellow and are co-PIs on a program project.  Stern and Hasselmo have co-authored papers, and share postdoctoral fellows.

Members:

Ian Davison  Assistant Professor, Biology.  Our lab studies the neural basis of sensory perception. How does the brain take millions of discrete pieces of raw sensory information, streaming in from primary receptor neurons, and synthesize them into a single unified percept? This process is the foundation of our sensory experience, and our aim is to describe the underlying neural circuit computations.

Uri Eden, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, develops mathematical and statistical methods to analyze neural spiking activity.

Timothy Gardner  Assistant Professor, Biology and Biomedical Engineering, works on neural circuits, vocal learning, time-frequency analysis, brain-machine interfaces.

Jeffery Gavornik  Post-Doctoral Research Associate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Researches how brain structure actually relates to function or how experience driven synaptic plasticity actually modifies the connections between neurons.

Xue Han  Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering, Her work focuses on          neurotechnology, optical neural modulation, optogenetics, neural prosthetics, neural network dynamics, brain rhythms, neurological and psychiatric diseases, cognition.

Marc Howard, Associate Professor of Psychological Sciences, develops mathematical models of cognition and evaluates their behavioral and neural predictions.

Karin Schon, Assistant Professor, currently focusing on investigating the role of aerobic exercise as a modulator of cognitive function and brain health in aging and Alzheimer’s disease in humans.

David Somers  Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences, research employs functional MRI, psychophysics, and computational modeling to investigate the mechanisms underlying visual perception and cognition. My laboratory performs experiments to identify the human brain circuitry which support different visual tasks, and to study how different cognitive factors such as attention modulate these circuits. Modeling work investigates the computational mechanisms at work in these circuits.

Robert Ross, Assistant Professor, University of New Hampshire, uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) in combination with genetic profiling to explore how people learn, store, and retrieve memories. He is particularly interested in determining the neural correlates of how we keep the details of similar memories separate from each other. Additionally, Dr. Ross is working to find a way to predict the types of cognitive change an individual with Parkinson’s Disease will Experience.