Kenneth D Harris

Last updated
Kenneth D Harris
Nationality British, American
AwardsWellcome Trust Senior Investigator 2011, European Research Council Advanced Investigator 2014, Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, EPSRC Leadership Fellowship, Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship
Scientific career
Fields Neuroscience, Computational Neuroscience, Systems Neuroscience
Institutions University College London (professor)

Kenneth D. Harris is a neuroscientist at University College London. He is most known for his contributions to the understanding of the neural code used by vast populations of neurons. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] Among his discoveries is the finding that populations in sensory areas of the brain also code for body movements. [6] Harris has contributed to the development of silicon probes [7] and most recently of Neuropixels probes. [8] With these probes, he and his team discovered that engagement in a task activates neurons throughout the brain. [9]

Harris obtained his PhD from UCL in the laboratory of Michael Recce, and did his postdoctoral studies at Rutgers University in the laboratory of Gyorgy Buzsaki. [10] He is a Professor of Quantitative Neuroscience [11] at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, where he co-directs the Cortical Processing Laboratory [12] with Matteo Carandini. Harris is a founding member of the International Brain Laboratory.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interneuron</span> Neurons that are not motor or sensory

Interneurons are neurons that connect to brain regions, i.e. not direct motor neurons or sensory neurons. Interneurons are the central nodes of neural circuits, enabling communication between sensory or motor neurons and the central nervous system (CNS). They play vital roles in reflexes, neuronal oscillations, and neurogenesis in the adult mammalian brain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matteo Carandini</span>

Matteo Carandini is a neuroscientist who studies the visual system. He is currently a professor at University College London, where he co-directs the Cortical Processing Laboratory with Kenneth D Harris.

The normalization model is an influential model of responses of neurons in primary visual cortex. David Heeger developed the model in the early 1990s, and later refined it together with Matteo Carandini and J. Anthony Movshon. The model involves a divisive stage. In the numerator is the output of the classical receptive field. In the denominator, a constant plus a measure of local stimulus contrast. Although the normalization model was initially developed to explain responses in the primary visual cortex, normalization is now thought to operate throughout the visual system, and in many other sensory modalities and brain regions, including the representation of odors in the olfactory bulb, the modulatory effects of visual attention, the encoding of value, and the integration of multisensory information. It has also been observed at subthreshold potentials in the hippocampus. Its presence in such a diversity of neural systems in multiple species, from invertebrates to mammals, suggests that normalization serves as a canonical neural computation. Divisive normalization reduces the redundancy in natural stimulus statistics and is sometimes viewed as an implementation of the efficient coding principle. Formally, divisive normalization is an information-maximizing code for stimuli following a multivariate Pareto distribution.

Optogenetics is a biological technique to control the activity of neurons or other cell types with light. This is achieved by expression of light-sensitive ion channels, pumps or enzymes specifically in the target cells. On the level of individual cells, light-activated enzymes and transcription factors allow precise control of biochemical signaling pathways. In systems neuroscience, the ability to control the activity of a genetically defined set of neurons has been used to understand their contribution to decision making, learning, fear memory, mating, addiction, feeding, and locomotion. In a first medical application of optogenetic technology, vision was partially restored in a blind patient with Retinitis pigmentosa.

Xiaowei Zhuang is a Chinese-American biophysicist who is the David B. Arnold Jr. Professor of Science, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and Professor of Physics at Harvard University, and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is best known for her work in the development of Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM), a super-resolution fluorescence microscopy method, and the discoveries of novel cellular structures using STORM. She received a 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing super-resolution imaging techniques that get past the diffraction limits of traditional light microscopes, allowing scientists to visualize small structures within living cells. She was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019 and was awarded a Vilcek Foundation Prize in Biomedical Science in 2020.

Susan L. Ackerman is an American neuroscientist and geneticist. Her work has highlighted some of the genetic and biochemical factors that are involved in the development of the central nervous system and age-related neurodegeneration. Her research is aimed at helping scientists understand what causes several types of neurodegeneration in mammals. This research, and others' like it, may lead to cures for neurodegenerative diseases. Ackerman is a professor at University of California San Diego. She was formerly a professor at the Jackson Laboratory and the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts University. She also serves as an adjunct professor at the University of Maine, Orono. Ackerman was an associate geneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.

Sharp waves and ripples (SWRs) are oscillatory patterns produced by extremely synchronised activity of neurons in the mammalian hippocampus and neighbouring regions which occur spontaneously in idle waking states or during NREM sleep. They can be observed with a variety of imaging methods, such as EEG. They are composed of large amplitude sharp waves in local field potential and produced by tens of thousands of neurons firing together within 30–100 ms window. They are some of the most synchronous oscillations patterns in the brain, making them susceptible to pathological patterns such as epilepsy.They have been extensively characterised and described by György Buzsáki and have been shown to be involved in memory consolidation in NREM sleep and the replay of memories acquired during wakefulness.

Laurence Frederick Abbott is an American theoretical neuroscientist, who is currently the William Bloor Professor of Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University, where he helped create the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. He is widely regarded as one of the leaders of theoretical neuroscience, and is coauthor, along with Peter Dayan, on the first comprehensive textbook on theoretical neuroscience, which is considered to be the standard text for students and researchers entering theoretical neuroscience. He helped invent the dynamic clamp method alongside Eve Marder.

György Buzsáki is the Biggs Professor of Neuroscience at New York University School of Medicine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dimitri Kullmann</span> British neurologist

Dimitri Michael Kullmann is a professor of neurology at the UCL Institute of Neurology, University College London (UCL), and leads the synaptopathies initiative funded by the Wellcome Trust. Kullmann is a member of the Queen Square Institute of Neurology Department of Clinical and Experimental Epilepsy and a consultant neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Angus Silver</span> English neuroscientist

Robin Angus Silver is Professor of Neuroscience and a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow at University College London. His laboratory studies neurotransmission and artificial neural networks by combining in vitro and in vivo experimental approaches with quantitative analysis and computational models developed in silico.

The International Brain Laboratory (IBL) is a collaborative research group that aims to develop the first global model of decision making in mice. In its first phase, IBL members are recording 100,000's of neurons across virtually all brain structures in mice performing the very same decision. IBL was officially launched in September 2017 thanks to a $10 million grant from Simons Foundation and a £10 million grant from the Wellcome Trust.

Samara Reck-Peterson is an American cell biologist and biophysicist. She is a Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of California, San Diego and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is known for her contributions to our understanding of how dynein, an exceptionally large motor protein that moves many intracellular cargos, works and is regulated. She developed one of the first systems to produce recombinant dynein and discovered that, unlike other cytoskeletal motors, dynein can take a wide variety of step sizes, forward and back and even sideways. She lives in San Diego, California.

Chenghua Gu is a Professor of Neurobiology at the Harvard Medical School where her research focuses on the Blood–brain barrier. She is also part of the Harvard Brain Science Initiative and has won numerous awards for her groundbreaking research on the brain's vascular component.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura Busse</span> German neuroscientist

Laura Busse is a German neuroscientist and professor of Systemic Neuroscience within the Division of Neurobiology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Busse's lab studies context-dependent visual processing in mouse models by performing large scale in vivo electrophysiological recordings in the thalamic and cortical circuits of awake and behaving mice.

Jessica Cardin is an American neuroscientist who is an associate professor of neuroscience at Yale University School of Medicine. Cardin's lab studies local circuits within the primary visual cortex to understand how cellular and synaptic interactions flexibly adapt to different behavioral states and contexts to give rise to visual perceptions and drive motivated behaviors. Cardin's lab applies their knowledge of adaptive cortical circuit regulation to probe how circuit dysfunction manifests in disease models.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carsen Stringer</span> American computational neuroscientist

Carsen Stringer is an American computational neuroscientist and Group Leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Research Campus. Stringer uses machine learning and deep neural networks to visualize large scale neural recordings and then probe the neural computations that give rise to visual processing in mice. Stringer has also developed several novel software packages that enable cell segmentation and robust analyses of neural recordings and mouse behavior.

Neuropixels probes are electrodes developed in 2017 to record the activity of hundreds of neurons in the brain. The probes are based on CMOS technology and have 1,000 recording sites arranged in two rows on a thin, 1-cm long shank.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tom Mrsic-Flogel</span> Experimental neuroscientist

Tom Mrsic-Flogel is an experimental neuroscientist. He is Director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre and a Professor in Neuroscience at University College London (UCL). Mrsic-Flogel is a founding member of the International Brain Laboratory.

References

  1. ↑ Harris, Kenneth D.; Csicsvari, Jozsef; Hirase, Hajime; Dragoi, George; Buzsáki, György (2003-07-31). "Organization of cell assemblies in the hippocampus". Nature. 424 (6948): 552–556. Bibcode:2003Natur.424..552H. doi:10.1038/nature01834. ISSN   1476-4687. PMID   12891358. S2CID   4420968.
  2. ↑ Luczak, Artur; Barthó, Peter; Marguet, Stephan L.; Buzsáki, György; Harris, Kenneth D. (2007-01-02). "Sequential structure of neocortical spontaneous activity in vivo". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 104 (1): 347–352. Bibcode:2007PNAS..104..347L. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0605643104 . ISSN   0027-8424. PMC   1765463 . PMID   17185420.
  3. ↑ Renart, Alfonso; de la Rocha, Jaime; Bartho, Peter; Hollender, Liad; Parga, Néstor; Reyes, Alex; Harris, Kenneth D. (2010-01-29). "The asynchronous state in cortical circuits". Science. 327 (5965): 587–590. Bibcode:2010Sci...327..587R. doi:10.1126/science.1179850. ISSN   1095-9203. PMC   2861483 . PMID   20110507.
  4. ↑ Stringer, Carsen; Pachitariu, Marius; Steinmetz, Nicholas; Carandini, Matteo; Harris, Kenneth D. (2019). "High-dimensional geometry of population responses in visual cortex". Nature. 571 (7765): 361–365. doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1346-5. ISSN   1476-4687. PMC   6642054 . PMID   31243367. Q72587818
  5. ↑ Stringer, Carsen; Pachitariu, Marius; Steinmetz, Nicholas; Reddy, Charu Bai; Carandini, Matteo; Harris, Kenneth D. (2019). "Spontaneous behaviors drive multidimensional, brainwide activity". Science. 364 (6437): 255. Bibcode:2019Sci...364..255S. doi:10.1126/science.aav7893. ISSN   1095-9203. PMC   6525101 . PMID   31000656.
  6. ↑ Cepelewicz, Jordana. "'Noise' in the Brain Encodes Surprisingly Important Signals". Quanta Magazine. Retrieved 2019-11-11.
  7. ↑ "$5M for international neuroscience 'dream team'". University of Michigan News. 2015-11-03. Retrieved 2019-09-23.
  8. ↑ HHMI. "New Silicon Probes Record Activity of Hundreds of Neurons Simultaneously". HHMI.org. Retrieved 2019-09-23.
  9. ↑ Abbott, Alison (2020-08-11). "Inside the mind of an animal". Nature. 584 (7820): 182–185. Bibcode:2020Natur.584..182A. doi: 10.1038/d41586-020-02337-x . PMID   32782378.
  10. ↑ "Neurotree - Kenneth D. Harris Family Tree". neurotree.org. Retrieved 2019-09-23.
  11. ↑ UCL (2019-02-08). "harris-kenneth". UCL Division of Biosciences. Retrieved 2019-09-23.
  12. ↑ UCL. "UCL - London's Global University". Cortexlab. Retrieved 2019-09-23.


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