- Speaker
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Gilles Laurent, Ph.D.Director, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research
Presidential Lectures are a series of free public colloquia spotlighting groundbreaking research across four themes: neuroscience and autism science, physics, biology, and mathematics and computer science. These curated, high-level scientific talks feature leading scientists and mathematicians and are designed to foster discussion and drive discovery within the New York City research community. We invite those interested in these topics to join us for this weekly lecture series.
Nervous systems evolved some 600 million years ago and quickly diversified, while facing the same physical constraints of life on Earth and responding to the shared pressures of natural selection. This combination of genetic diversification and shared pressures led to functional convergence (i.e., a need to find solutions to shared problems) and a diversity of solutions (linked to each clade’s or species’ individual history). Therefore, an interesting problem in neuroscience is identifying the levels of description and understanding at which common principles can be defined.
In this Presidential Lecture, Gilles Laurent will describe several examples of neural and circuit computation studied by his lab over recent decades in insects (vision and olfaction), cephalopods (camouflage and texture matching) and reptiles (sleep and circadian rhythms). He will illustrate levels of description that might be suited to identifying shared principles and present the need to diversify our models of neuroscientific study if we wish to identify such seemingly general principles of neural circuit computation.
About the Speaker
Laurent studied veterinary medicine and neuroethology in Toulouse, France, before learning neuroscience as a postdoc at the University of Cambridge in England. He went on to join the Caltech Division of Biology faculty before becoming the director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany. He has had the privilege and luck to be educated by more than 70 brilliant graduate students and postdocs over the past 35 years.