"Building (on) a Null Model for Big-data Neuroscience"

Audrey Sederberg, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Physics
Department of Psychology
Georgia Tech

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*Lunch provided for in-person attendees

Abstract
Recording technology developed in recent decades has enabled observing activity across thousands and even tens of thousands of neurons, providing a view of neural activity that was previously inconceivable. Such recordings frequently show highly non-trivial statistical structure in space and time, but explaining and interpreting this structure remains a challenge. I'll give a tour of several new and ongoing projects in the Sederberg lab in which relatively simple models take us surprisingly far in understanding large-scale neuronal behavior, and how we're using these models to understand the diversity of neuronal network behavior across brain areas, developmental stages, and disease states.

Bio
Audrey Sederberg, Ph.D. uses theoretical and analytic approaches to uncover the principles of neuronal network dynamics and function. She earned her doctorate in theoretical physics at Princeton University, working with William Bialek, Ph.D. She then conducted postdoctoral research, in experimental neurobiology (University of Chicago) and neural data science (Georgia Tech), and as a fellow in the Theory and Modeling of Living Systems at Emory University. In 2021, she established her research group at the University of Minnesota as a member of the Medical Discovery Team for Optical Imaging and Brain Science. Grounded by close collaboration with experimental labs, her group works at the intersection of experimental and theoretical neuroscience, spanning multiple scales, recording techniques, and species. Her research is supported by a BRAIN Initiative grant from the NIMH and a Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. In 2023, Sederberg was honored with the John Ohlfest Memorial Faculty Mentorship Award for her exceptional teaching and mentoring within Minnesota's Graduate Program in Neuroscience. In August 2023, she returned to Atlanta to join the Schools of Psychology and Physics at Georgia Tech.

Faculty Host: Hannah Choi, Ph.D.

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