This seminar will be held in the Jerome L. Greene Science Center on Columbia's Manhattanville campus (9th floor lecture hall). Columbia University's Intercampus Shuttle Service is the best way to travel between campuses.

Synapses are the fundamental nodes of information transmission in the brain. The efficacy of synaptic transmission, called synaptic strength and its use-dependent changes are crucial for how the brain perceives the environment, learns and stores memories. The highly diverse synaptic strengths found in a given connection at a particular moment in the hippocampal circuit may therefore reflect varied information coding and on-going learning associated with hippocampal-dependent tasks. However, the cellular and molecular basis by which synaptic strength diversity arises, that is, how synaptic strengths are set and controlled across a synapse population remain to be clarified. Dr. Goda has addressed this question by examining the interaction between multiple synapses of hippocampal neurons using a combination of electrophysiology and imaging approaches. She and her team provide evidence for a novel cellular mechanism involving glial cells in regulating the heterogeneity of synaptic strengths across inputs received by single hippocampal neurons. Their findings underscore the role for glia in orchestrating synaptic transmission properties across a synapse population.

Dr. Goda received her BSc degree at the University of Toronto, then carried out her PhD work in the Biochemistry Department at Stanford University. After her postdoctoral work at the Salk Institute, she joined the faculty of Biology Division, University of California, San Diego in 1997. She moved to the UK in 2002 as a Senior Group Leader in the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology at University College London. In 2011, she moved back to Japan to set up a group in RIKEN Brain Science Institute, a predecessor to RIKEN CBS. Current research efforts in her laboratory focus on the regulation of synaptic microcircuits in the hippocampus that plays a crucial role in aspects of memory. Her awards include Daniel X. Freedman (1998) and Distinguished Investigator (2003) Awards from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, Klingenstein Fellowship in the Neurosciences (2001-2003), and she was recognized for her work by The Brain Science Foundation as a recipient of the 2013 Tsukahara Nakaakira Prize. She is currently a member of the Science Council of Japan, and serves on the Society for Neuroscience Program Committee and the editorial boards of journals including Cell, Neuron, eLife, and Trends in Neurosciences.

Those who wish to meet the speaker during their visit should contact Heike Blockus (Polleux 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.