This seminar will be held in the Neurological Institute of New York's Auditorium (1st floor). Columbia University's Intercampus Shuttle Service is the best way to travel between campuses.

Animals rely on olfaction to find food, attract mates and avoid predators. In this talk, Dr. Franks will present some of his lab's recent findings about how different features of an odor stimulus, such as odor identity and odor intensity, are encoded in mouse piriform cortex, and will reveal the specific roles that different elements of the neural circuit play in shaping those representations.

Dr. Franks' PhD work involved modeling properties of quantal synaptic transmission and intracellular calcium dynamics with Terry Sejnowski at UCSD. He then stayed at UCSD for a brief postdoc with Jeff Isaacson, where he started studying olfactory bulb inputs are integrated in piriform cortex. He continued this work at Columbia with Richard Axel and Steve Siegelbaum, before moving to Duke University in 2013.

Those who wish to meet the speaker during their visit should contact Jennifer Scribner (Axel Lab). For general inquiries please contact [email protected].

The Columbia Neuroscience Seminar series is a collaborative effort of Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Department of Neuroscience, the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior and the Columbia Translational Neuroscience Initiative, and with support from the Kavli Institute for Brain Science.