Zachary Mobille, QBioS 4th Year Seminar

QBioS 4th Year Seminars for Spring 2025 have been scheduled!

Join us on Tuesdays from 12:30-1:30pm
Cherry Emerson Room 204
Pick-up lunch in Cherry Emerson 201B prior to the talk.
Talk flyers will be distributed prior to each event.

Zach's talk will be, "Information coding and structural motifs in spiking neural networks." 

The relationship between structure and dynamics runs both ways in neural systems. Connectivity can shape the ways in which populations of neurons encode stimuli. The spiking activity of neurons can weaken or strengthen the synaptic coupling that binds them together. Yet, we still do not have a full understanding of how precise spiking and network structure influence each other.  The purpose of my thesis is therefore two-fold: 1) to characterize the computational implications of a ubiquitous feedforward network structure on stimulus information representation with precisely timed action potentials and 2) to understand how certain connectivity motifs are promoted by plasticity in recurrent networks of spiking neurons that are both spontaneously active and stimulus-driven. We take a data-driven mathematical modeling approach to these problems. I will begin by discussing completed work related to 1) and end by presenting ongoing work related to 2).