Abstract
Efficient and stable transmission of information across neural circuits in the brain requires that its components, the individual neurons and the connections between them, be correctly tuned and maintained at stable levels. I will present computational and theoretical work that address how neural activity, generated spontaneously in the circuit or driven by external stimuli, guides network organisation and resulting computation. I will first discuss our characterization of a single neuron computational property that emerges during postnatal development in mouse cortex. Our work demonstrates that this intrinsic property profoundly influences the transmission of information over multiple timescales through the cortical network. This highlights the role of single neuron properties in how networks transition from spontaneous synchronous activity generation to asynchronous information processing during cortical development. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss how organisation at the level of sensory neuronal populations emerges from an efficient coding strategy to maximise information transfer of incoming stimuli. Our work underscores the significance of external stimulus statistics and neural noise in governing how populations organise to efficiently encode and decode sensory information.
Biography
Julijana Gjorgjieva conducts research in computational and theoretical neuroscience. She is interested in how brain circuits become tuned to maintain a balance between constant change as we learn new things, and robustness to produce reliable behavior. She is interested in two aspects of neural circuit organization: how it emerges from the interaction of neuronal and synaptic properties during development, and from optimality and energy conservation principles that operate over the longer timescales of evolution.
Julijana Gjorgjieva studied mathematics at Harvey Mudd College in California, USA. She obtained her PhD in 2011 at the University of Cambridge, UK in Applied Mathematics working with Stephen Eglen, and spent a few research visits at the University of Washington in Seattle, US working with Adrienne Fairhall. From 2011 until 2014 she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University with Haim Sompolinsky and Markus Meister, and from 2014-2016 she was a postdoctoral researcher with Eve Marder at Brandeis University having won a fellowship from the Swartz Foundation and a career award from the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund. She started her independent research group in 2016 at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany and joined the Technical University of Munich in Munich, Germany as an assistant professor shortly after. She is also a member of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Munich.