Neuroscience Graduate Training at Brandeis
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The human brain has roughly as many neurons as there are stars in our galaxy, making it an enormously complex adaptive system. Making sense of this complexity increasingly requires neuroscientists who are both broadly trained critical and creative thinkers, and who have extensive analytic and computational skills. The Interdepartmental Neuroscience graduate program at Brandeis comprises a comprehensive training program designed to give the next generation of outstanding neuroscientists the cognitive and technical skills they need to make important breakthroughs in understanding nervous system function and health.
Our program is characterized by a diverse and highly collaborative set of internationally renowned faculty, with research programs that incorporate all the major subdisciplines of the field. Collaboration is part of the air we breathe: being a vibrant program embedded in a small and intimate research university naturally encourages interactions across model systems and at the interfaces between disciplines. During laboratory rotations students are encouraged to explore intellectual frameworks and acquire a range of skills, and throughout their PhD will interact with and receive mentoring from a diverse group of faculty, as well as near-peer mentoring from a strong cohort of interdisciplinary graduate students and postdocs. Our trainees are highly successful in a range of pursuits after graduation, including academic and industrial science, science policy, and science communication.
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Research labs at Brandeis frequently publish peer-reviewed research together. Some of the publications are listed here:
- Herzog LE, Katz DB, & Jadhav SP. (2020). Refinement and reactivation of a taste-responsive hippocampal network. Current Biology, 30(7):1306-1311, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.01.063.
- Liu, C., Meng, Z., Wiggin, T.D., Reed, M.L., Guo, F., Zhang, Y., Rosbash M, and Griffith LC. (2019) A serotonin-modulated circuit controls sleep architecture to regulate cognitive function independent of total sleep in Drosophila. Curr Biol 29:3635-3646 PMC6832866.
- Tatavarty V, Torrado Pacheco A, Groves Kuhnle C, Lin H, Koundinya P, Miska NJ, Hengen KB, Wagner FF, Van Hooser SD, Turrigiano GG. Autism-Associated Shank3 Is Essential for Homeostatic Compensation in Rodent V1. Neuron. 2020 Mar 10. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2020.02.033.
- Levitan D, Lin JY, Marrero E, Beltrame Y, Shima R, Ghoddousi TY, Katz DB, & Nelson SB. (2020). Deletion of Stk11 and Fos BLA projection neurons alters intrinsic excitability and impairs formation of aversive memory. eLife. in review
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Herzog LE, Pascual LM, Scott SJ, Mathieson ER, Katz DB,* & Jadhav SP.* (2019). Interaction of taste and place coding in the hippocampus. J Neurosci, 39, 3057-3069.
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Levitan D, Lin J-Y, Wachukta J, Mukherjee N, Nelson SB, & Katz DB. (2019). Single and population coding of taste in the gustatory cortex of awake mice. J Neurophysiol, 122, 1342-1356.
- Flores VL, Parmet T, Mukherjee N, Nelson S, Katz DB, & Levitan D. (2018). The role of the gustatory cortex in incidental experience-evoked enhancement of later taste learning. Learn Mem, 25(11), 587-600.
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Bronk P, Kuklin EA, Gorur-Shandilya S, Liu C, Wiggin TD, Reed ML, Marder E, and Griffith LC. (2018) Regulation of Eag by Ca(2+)/calmodulin controls presynaptic excitability in Drosophila. J Neurophysiol 119, 1665-1680
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Moore AR, Richards SE, Kenny K, Royer L, Chan U, Flavahan K, Van Hooser SD, and Paradis S. (2018) Rem2 stabilizes intrinsic excitability and spontaneous firing in visual circuits. Elife 7
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Christie IK, Miller P, and Van Hooser SD. (2017) Cortical amplification models of experience-dependent development of selective columns and response sparsification. J Neurophysiol 118, 874-893
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Herzog JJ, Deshpande M, Shapiro L, Rodal AA, and Paradis S. (2017) TDP-43 misexpression causes defects in dendritic growth. Sci Rep 7, 15656
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Guo F, Yu J, Jung HJ, Abruzzi KC, Luo W, Griffith LC, and Rosbash M. (2016) Circadian neuron feedback controls the Drosophila sleep--activity profile. Nature 536, 292-297
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Hengen KB, Torrado Pacheco A, McGregor JN, Van Hooser SD, and Turrigiano GG. (2016) Neuronal Firing Rate Homeostasis Is Inhibited by Sleep and Promoted by Wake. Cell 165, 180-191
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Sadacca BF, Mukherjee N, Vladusich T, Li JX, Katz DB, and Miller P. (2016) The Behavioral Relevance of Cortical Neural Ensemble Responses Emerges Suddenly. J Neurosci 36, 655-669
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Steinmetz CC, Tatavarty V, Sugino K, Shima Y, Joseph A, Lin H, Rutlin M, Lambo M, Hempel CM, Okaty BW, Paradis S, Nelson SB, and Turrigiano GG. (2016) Upregulation of mu3A Drives Homeostatic Plasticity by Rerouting AMPAR into the Recycling Endosomal Pathway. Cell Rep 16, 2711-2722
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Cousins KA, Dar H, Wingfield A, and Miller P. (2014) Acoustic masking disrupts time-dependent mechanisms of memory encoding in word-list recall. Mem Cognit 42, 622-638
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Ghiretti AE, Moore AR, Brenner RG, Chen LF, West AE, Lau NC, Van Hooser SD, and Paradis S. (2014) Rem2 is an activity-dependent negative regulator of dendritic complexity in vivo. J Neurosci 34, 392-407
- Van Hooser SD, Escobar GM, Maffei A, and Miller P. (2014) Emerging feed-forward inhibition allows the robust formation of direction selectivity in the developing ferret visual cortex. J Neurophysiol 111, 2355-2373
- Yu YV, Bell HW, Glauser D, Van Hooser SD, Goodman MB, and Sengupta P. (2014) CaMKI-dependent regulation of sensory gene expression mediates experience-dependent plasticity in the operating range of a thermosensory neuron. Neuron 84, 919-926
- Birren SJ, and Marder E. (2013) Neuroscience. Plasticity in the neurotransmitter repertoire. Science 340, 436-437
- Hengen KB, Lambo ME, Van Hooser SD, Katz DB, and Turrigiano GG. (2013) Firing rate homeostasis in visual cortex of freely behaving rodents. Neuron 80, 335-342
- Miller P, and Katz DB. (2013) Accuracy and response-time distributions for decision-making: linear perfect integrators versus nonlinear attractor-based neural circuits.J Comput Neurosci 35, 261-294
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Ni L, Bronk P, Chang EC, Lowell AM, Flam JO, Panzano VC, Theobald DL, Griffith LC, and Garrity PA. (2013) A gustatory receptor paralogue controls rapid warmth avoidance in Drosophila. Nature 500, 580-584
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Sengupta P, and Garrity P. (2013) Sensing temperature. Curr Biol 23, R304-307
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Shang Y, Donelson NC, Vecsey CG, Guo F, Rosbash M, and Griffith LC. (2013) Short neuropeptide F is a sleep-promoting inhibitory modulator. Neuron 80, 171-183
Neuroscience faculty members listed in bold.
