Keynote Speaker Terrence Sejnowski "Think Globally, Act Locally"

Terrence Sejnowski is an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a Professor at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and a Professor of Biology at the University of California, San Diego, where he is Director of the Institute for Neural Computation. The long-range goal of Dr. Sejnowski's laboratory is to understand the computational resources of brains and to build linking principles from brain to behavior using computational models. This goal is being pursued with a combination of theoretical and experimental approaches at several levels of investigation ranging from the biophysical level to the systems level. Hippocampal and cortical slice preparations are being used to explore the properties of single neurons and synapses, including the precision of spike firing and the influence of neuromodulators. Biophysical models of electrical and chemical signal processing within neurons are used as an adjunct to physiological experiments. New techniques have been developed for modeling cell signaling using Monte Carlo methods (MCell). His laboratory has developed new methods for analyzing the sources for electrical and magnetic signals recorded from the scalp and hemodynamic signals from functional brain imaging by blind separation using independent components analysis (ICA).