Editorial Board
The Editor in Chief
S. MURRAY SHERMAN
is Maurice Goldblatt Professor and Chairman in the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Chicago. His books include Functional Connections of Cortical Areas and Exploring the Thalamus and its Role in Cortical Function. Dr. Sherman is the author of more than 150 scientific papers, has served on the committees of several scientific organizations, and on the editorial boards of multiple journals including Journal of Neuroscience, Visual Neurosciences, and Thalamus and Related Systems. He has held visiting academic positions at universities in the UK and China. The main focus of Dr. Sherman's research is directed towards understanding thalamic functional organization through a variety of interdisciplinary techniques.
The Senior Editorial Board
JOHN BYRNE
John H. “Jack” Byrne, PhD, is a professor and the June and Virgil Waggoner Chair in the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at McGovern Medical School of The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). He also serves as director of the Neuroscience Research Center at UTHealth. Dr. Byrne’s research uses a combination of experimental and computational approaches to provide an understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms of learning and memory using Aplysia as a model system. He is an author, co-author or co-editor of 227 journal articles, 84 book chapters and 15 books. In his editorial capacities, Dr. Byrne has served as editor-in-chief of the journal Learning & Memory since 1996, in addition to serving as a member of the editorial boards of Behavioral Neuroscience, Journal of Neural Engineering, Journal of Neurobiology, Journal of Neurophysiology, Journal of Neuroscience, and Physiological Reviews. Dr. Byrne has also provided service to numerous scientific review and advisory committees, including recent service as chair of the NIH Study Section on Learning, Memory and Decision Neuroscience. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the recipient of various honors and awards for his research and teaching.
JAVIER DEFELIPE
is a Research Professor at the Instituto Cajal (CSIC, Spain). His particular expertise lies in the correlation of electron microscopy data with the synaptic connectivity of neurons previously identified using functional markers, or by intracellular labelling. Another of his principal interests is the analysis of alterations of cortical circuits in epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease and in the study of the history of cortical organization and function. Furthermore, his laboratory is involved in the development of a variety of software tools to classify neuronal cell types and to examine the anatomical design (neuronal morphology and synaptic organization) of brain circuits. DeFelipe is the Director of the Laboratorio Cajal de Circuitos Corticales (Centro de Tecnología Biomédica, UPM) and of the Plataforma Cajal Blue Brain (Instituto Cajal, CSIC), and member of the Science and Infrastructure Board of the Human Brain Project. He is also fascinated by the link between the study of the brain and art, and he has been involved in organizing and curating numerous exhibitions around the world. DeFelipe has written several articles, chapters, and books on both this subject and the influence of Santiago Ramón y Cajal in modern neuroscience.
NICHO HATSOPOULOS
Nicholas G. “Nicho” Hatsopoulos, Ph.D. is currently a Professor at the University of Chicago. Dr. Hatsopoulos was also Chairman of the Computational Neuroscience graduate program from 2008-2015. Dr. Hatsopoulos completed two postdoctoral research fellowships, one in the Department of Neuroscience at Brown University and the other in the Computational Neuroscience Program at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Hatsopoulos completed his B.A. in Physics from Williams College in 1984, his M.S. in Psychology in 1991 and his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from Brown University in 1992. In 2001, he co-founded a company, Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems, which took the basic scientific research he and his colleagues conducted to develop neural prosthesis technology to assist people with severe motor disabilities. His research focuses on the neural basis of motor control and learning. He is investigating what features of motor behavior are encoded and how this information is represented in the collective activity of neuronal ensembles in the motor cortex. He is also interested in how these representations change as motor learning occurs. To answer these questions, the electrical discharge of many motor cortical neurons is simultaneously recorded using multi-electrode arrays and correlated with motor behavior. The encoding properties of individual motor cortical neurons are being studied to determine how these single cell properties relate to higher-order representations involving groups of neurons. The possibility that changes in functional connectivity among neurons may occur during motor learning is also being explored.
SHIRA KNAFO
Prof. Shira Knafo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physiology and Cell Biology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and a Visiting Professor at the University of the Basque Country, Spain. With an MD and PhD in Neuroscience from Ben-Gurion University, Dr. Knafo has made significant contributions to understanding the synaptic mechanisms underlying cognitive function and neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Alzheimer's disease. Her research, which has been published in high-impact journals such as Nature Neuroscience, Molecular Psychiatry, and PLoS Biology, focuses on the molecular basis of cognitive enhancement and the therapeutic potential of targeting synaptic pathways. She has been honored with several prestigious awards, including the Sieratzki Prize for Advances in Neuroscience and the "Woman of the Year in Medicine" accolade. Dr. Knafo is also an active member of various scientific committees and editorial boards, including Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience and the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, where she contributes her expertise to the broader neuroscience community.
RAMON NOGUEIRA MANAS
Ramon Nogueira Manas is Assistant Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on characterizing the geometry of neural representations in the high-dimensional neural state space to understand the computational support of artificial and biological cognition. He combines mathematical modelling with tools from machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to shed light on the connection between brain activity and behavior, and contributes to the emerging field of neuroAI.
W. MARTIN USREY
is editor of sensory systems for the ORE of Neuroscience. He is Professor and Chair of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior and Professor of Neurology at UC Davis. His research is focused on understanding the functional properties of neural circuits that serve vision and the relationship between circuit activity, behavior and perception. He has authored over 70 publications and directed several international courses and conferences on sensory processing and thalamocortical relations. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. The Usrey laboratory is home to Brainmaps.org, an interactive, high-resolution digital brain atlas and virtual microscope for students, educators, and researchers.
The Advisory Board
ELIZABETH A. BUFFALO
Beth Buffalo is a neuroscientist exploring the neural mechanisms that support learning and memory. She is widely recognized for her studies on the relationships between eye movements and neural activity in the hippocampus and adjacent cortical structures, and for her discovery of grid cells in the macaque entorhinal cortex related to eye movements. Dr. Buffalo received a B.A. in Philosophy from Wellesley College, and an M.A. (Philosophy) and Ph.D. (Neurosciences) from the University of California, San Diego. She was a postdoctoral scholar in the Laboratory of Neuropsychology at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Buffalo joined the faculty at Emory University in 2005, and then moved her lab to the University of Washington in 2013, where she currently is the Wayne E. Crill Endowed Professor and Chair of Physiology and Biophysics. She has received several awards for her research including the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences for her innovative, multidisciplinary study of the hippocampus and the neural basis of memory. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences.
HOLLIS CLINE
is editor of developmental neuroscience for the ORE of Neuroscience. She is the Hahn Professor of Neuroscience and co-chair of the Department of Neuroscience at Scripps Research in La Jolla, CA. She is a Councilor for the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and has served on the council of the National Eye Institute (NEI) and on the Blue Ribbon Review Panel for the 10-year review of the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD). Dr. Cline is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has received the prestigious NIH Director’s Pioneer Award. Dr. Cline is a Past President of the Society for Neuroscience. She received her BA from Bryn Mawr College and her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, followed by postdoctoral training at Yale University and Stanford University. She has served on the faculty of the University of Iowa and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where she served as the Director of Research from 2002-2006. Dr. Cline’s research has demonstrated the roles of a variety of activity-dependent mechanisms in controlling structural plasticity of neuronal dendrites and axons, synaptic maturation and topographic map formation. This body of work has helped to generate a comprehensive understanding of the role of experience in shaping brain development. Two key points to emerge from her research are that circuit formation in vivo is a dynamic process throughout development that is continuously guided by experience, and that the basic mechanisms governing brain development, plasticity, information processing and organizational principles of brain circuits are highly conserved across vertebrates.
MICHELE A. BASSO
is a Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and Neurobiology. She studied Neuroscience at Stony Brook University in NY and was a post-doctoral fellow at the National Eye Institute, NIH. After serving as a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin Madison, she moved to UCLA to join the faculty and direct the Fuster Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience. The work performed in her laboratory is aimed at unravelling the neuronal circuits of decision-making in health and disease. Her work spans multiple species and employs multiple technologies designed to understand how memory and sensory information are combined to give rise to our decisions.
JENNIFER M. GROH
is Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience and Neurobiology at Duke University, where she is a member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. Her research concerns how the brain represents spatial information and performs computations on those representations. Her discoveries have shed light on how the brain transforms auditory signals to permit communication with visual signals - despite major differences in the neural “language” used by each sense. She is the recipient of numerous awards including an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program grant and a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship. She has authored numerous scientific publications as well as a well-regarded book for a general audience (Making Space: How the Brain Knows Where Things Are, Harvard University Press, 2014) and a related popular Coursera course The Brain and Space.
PAUL KATZ
is Professor and Director of Neuroscience at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He uses sea slugs to understand how neuronal circuits operate and to explore how they might shed light on the evolution of neural circuits underlying behavior. His lab uses intracellular electrophysiology combined with computational techniques such as dynamic clamp and bioinformatics of transcriptomes to compare neural circuits in different species. Katz serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Neurophysiology, Journal of Invertebrate Neuroscience, and Brain, Behavior, and Evolution. He served as president of the International Society for Neuroethology and was co-director of the Neural Systems and Behavior course at the MBL in Woods Hole, MA. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships and has authored over 100 articles and chapters.
LORNE MENDELL
is editor of neural plasticity for the ORE of Neuroscience. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Neurobiology and Behavior at Stony Brook University. He was awarded a B.Sc. degree in Mathematics and Physics from McGill University in 1961. In 1965, he received a Ph.D. in Neurophysiology from M.I.T. At Stony Brook he served as chair of the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior from 1986 to 2006. He has previously served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Neurophysiology, President of the Association of Neuroscience Departments and Programs, and President of the Society for Neuroscience. He is presently Chair of the Spinal Cord Injury Research Board of the State of New York as well as a Director of the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation. His research interests focus on neuroplasticity of the mammalian spinal cord.
RANDY J. NELSON
is the editor of neuroendocrine and autonomic system for the ORE of neuroscience. He holds the Hazel Ruby McQuain Chair for Neurological Research in the West Virginia University School of Medicine and is director of basic science research in the WVU Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, as well as across the university. He also leads the neuroscience PhD program at the Health Sciences Center and serves as a professor in the WVU Department of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry.
He began his graduate career at Berkeley with work on canine behavioral sex differentiation with Dr. Frank Beach. After receiving his MA in Psychology in 1980, he began focusing on circadian rhythms and photoperiodism with Dr. Irving Zucker. He earned a PhD in Psychology in 1983, as well as a second PhD in Endocrinology in 1984 from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Nelson then went on to complete a postdoctoral fellowship in reproductive physiology with Drs. Frank Bronson and Claude Desjardins at the Institute for Reproductive Biology at the University of Texas, Austin from 1984-1986.
He served on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University from 1986 until 2000 where he was Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, Biochemistry, and Molecular Biology. He then served on the faculty at the Ohio State University from 2000 until 2017 where he was Distinguished Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, and a member of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at OSU School of Medicine. He joined the faculty at WVU in the spring semester of 2018. Dr. Nelson has published over 200 research articles and several books describing studies in seasonality, behavioral endocrinology, biological rhythms, immune function, sex behavior, and aggressive behaviors.
MICHAEL SHADLEN
is Professor of Neuroscience and Principal Investigator of the Shadlen Lab at the Kavali Institute for Brain Science at Columbia University. He is the recipient of several awards including the Golden Brain Award from the Minerva Foundation, the McKnight Scholars Award for Research in Neuroscience, and the W. Alden Spencer Award. His work examines neurons in the association cortex that process information from the visual cortex to give rise to interpretations, decisions, and plans for behavior. His experiments combine electrophysiology and behavioral and computational methods to advance our knowledge of higher brain function.
ERIC SHEA-BROWN
is professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Washington, affiliate investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and adjunct professor at Department of Physiology and Biophysics. At UW he co-directs the new UW Computational Neuroscience Center and the Swartz Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. Eric began his work in computational neuroscience under the mentorship of applied mathematician Philip Holmes and cognitive neuroscientist Jonathan Cohen, both at Princeton, and went on to study as a postdoc with John Rinzel at NYU’s Courant Institute and Center for Neural Science. His work, which was recognized by career awards from the NSF and Burroughs Wellcome Fund, combines dynamical systems and statistics tools to uncover basic mechanisms of coding in neural circuits.
XIAO-JING WANG
is Global Professor of neural science and co-director of the Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, both at New York University. He also serves as associate vice chancellor for research and co-director of NYU-ECNU Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science at New York University Shanghai. Wang’s research aims at understanding the neurobiological mechanisms and computational principles of executive and cognitive functions. His group has pioneered recurrent circuit models of the prefrontal cortex, which is often called the “CEO of the brain.” In particular, Wang is known for his work on the neural basis of working memory and decision making.
STEPHEN WAXMAN
is Bridget M. Flaherty Professor of Neurology, Neurobiology and Pharmacology at the Yale School of Medicine. He is also Founder and Director for the Center for Neuroscience and Regeneration Research. Dr. Waxman has published more than 600 scientific papers. He has as edited nine books, and is the author of Spinal Cord Compression and of Clinical Neuroanatomy (translated into eight languages). He has served on the editorial boards of numerous journals including The Journal of Physiology, Brain, Annals of Neurology, Trends in Neurosciences, Nature Reviews Neurology, and Trends in Molecular Medicine, and is Editor-in-Chief of Neuroscience Letters. He is the recipient of multiple awards including the Annual Prize of the British Physiological Society, an honor he shares with Nobel Prize laureates Andrew Huxley, John Eccles, and Alan Hodgkin. He most recently was honored with the Paul Magnuson Award of the Veterans Administration for his achievements in translation of laboratory advances into new therapeutic strategies for restoration of function after injury to the brain, spinal cord and peripheral nerves.
ROBERT WURTZ
is Founding Chief and Senior Investigator of the NIH’s Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research. Dr. Wurtz was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1988, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1997, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1990, and he was President of the Society for Neuroscience in 1990. The focus of his research is the neurobiology of vision and eye movements.
