Welcome to our lab web page. I was trained by Mark Konishi during my graduate studies at Caltech and by Nobuo Suga during my postdoctoral studies at Washington University. In our work we try to maintain the neuroethological perspective that their work has so elegantly embodied. dan@ bigbird.uchicago.edu 

I’m a visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago since August 2021. I am mostly interested in understanding how the brain generates and learns complex sequential behaviors, as well as understanding the neurophysiological underpinnings of learning and memory at the levels of synaptic and intrinsic plasticity. Through my collaboration with Dr. Daniel Margoliash (who was my former mentor and postdoc advisor), I generate biophysically realistic mathematical models of single neurons, as well as networks of neurons, based on the intracellular data I collect in the Margoliash lab. The models generate predictions which I then test in the lab via various computational and physiological techniques, including microstimulation, neuropharmacology, immunohistochemistry, neuroanatomy, etc. Currently, we are studying the role intrinsic plasticity plays in the developmental learning process of the zebra finch.

I am a fourth year student in neurobiology, interested in the fundamental cellular mechanisms underlying learning and memory. 

Physics Department and Scripps Institution of Oceanography

University of California, San Diego

habarbanel@ucsd.edu

We consider how one can determine the structure of complex nonlinear systems. Using ideas from nonlinear dynamics and statistical physics, we have developed exact integral representations of the way model systems behave when information from experimental and field measurements from the system they model are presented to them. This representation, in practical use with approximations designed for the biophysical or physical system at hand, allows accurate estimates of the state and parameters of the model. This allows the model, a dynamical rule for predicting future behavior of the system, to be used for forecasting.

In the Margoliash lab we work with individual neurons and small circuits of neurons from the songbird system with our start being an analysis of the song production pathway: HVC–>RA–>brainstem–>songbox.

Slice experiments are done on individual neurons in these nuclei, and their electrophysiological properties are inferred from short time series. These become the ingredients for the larger circuits comprising the song production pathway.

Gabriel B. Mindlin, Ph.D.

Howard C. Nusbaum

Todd Roberts