February 28, 2002
Hille Neurosciences Lecture: Researcher at Brandeis uses ‘dynamic clamp’ to study neural network development
Dr. Eve Marder, professor of biology at The Volen Center of Brandeis University, will present the 12th annual Einar Hille Memorial Lecture in Neurosciences, sponsored by the Department of Physiology and Biophysics.
She will speak on “Activity and Modulation in Developing and Adult Neural Circuits” on Monday, March 4, at 3:30 pm in room D-209 in the Health Sciences Center. The lecture is open to everyone.
Marder studies the neural mechanisms responsible for generating rhythmic behaviors such as walking and breathing. Her experiments employ the simple nervous systems of lobsters and crabs to reveal fundamental principles that apply to rhythmic behavior in all animals, including man.
Rhythmic behaviors are governed by neural circuits called central pattern generators. Understanding the control of rhythmic behaviors by central pattern generators provides the foundation for understanding more complex behaviors controlled by correspondingly more complex neural networks.
Marder investigates the mechanisms by which neurotransmitters and peptides modulate the output of central pattern generators. She has pioneered the use of the dynamic clamp technique to study the modulation of neural networks.
The dynamic clamp allows the investigator to impose a sort of “virtual reality” on a neural circuit, by creating a computerized mathematical model of a hypothetical neuron and then allowing a computer to control injection of electrical currents into real neurons in the circuit, as dictated by the properties of the hypothetical neuron. This method allows the investigator to construct new circuits of previously unconnected neurons and provides a way of testing the predictions of computational models at both the single neuron and circuit level.
Such studies have revealed that some rhythmic behaviors are produced by pacemaker neurons that are intrinsically oscillatory in their activity, while other rhythmic behaviors are said to reflect “emergent properties” of the neural network, because the output of the network oscillates, but none of the neurons of the network are individually oscillatory.
Marder received a bachelor’s degree in biology with honors from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. in biology from the University of California, San Diego. Following postdoctoral training at the University of Oregon in Eugene and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, she accepted a faculty position at Brandeis University in 1978. She has received numerous honors, including a Jacob Javits Award from the National Institutes of Health, and awards from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and from the McKnight Foundation, and was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has served as program director of the Sloan Center for Theoretical Neuroscience and chair of the neuroscience Ph.D. program at Brandeis.
The Einar Hille Memorial Lecture in Neurosciences was established by Kriti Hille in honor of her late husband. Dr. Hille was a professor of mathematics at Yale University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Their son, Dr. Bertil Hille, is a professor of physiology and biophysics at the UW.
