Further information
Professor Dante Chialvo, Dept. of Physiology, Northwestern University, Chicago, USA presents “The barin: What is critical about it?”
Abstract: In this talk we discuss our proposal that the most fascinating brain properties are related to the fact that it always stays close to a second order phase transition. It is only in such conditions that the collective of neuronal groups can reliably generate robust and flexible behavior, because it is known that at the critical point there is the largest abundance of metastable states to choose from. We will review the motivation, the arguments and recent results from diferents levels, from neurons up to behaviour, both in health and disease indicating the usefullnes as well as some further implications of this view of the functioning brain.
Biography: Dante R. Chialvo received his M.D. in 1982 from the National University of Rosario, in Argentina, where he was appointed Adjunct Professor of Physiology in 1985. From 1987 to 1992 was Assistant Professor in the State University of New York (Syracuse, NY) in the Department of Pharmacology and latter in the Computational Neuroscience Program. Between 1992 and 1995 was associated with the Santa Fe Institute for the Sciences of Complexity, in Santa Fe, New Mxico. Dr. Chialvo has published more than 50 scientific papers, all dedicated to understand natural phenomena from the point of view of Nonlinear Dynamics of Complex Systems. His work covered a wide range of topics, including the mathematical modeling of cardiac arrhythmias, the study of molecular motors as stochastic ratchets, neural coding, and self-organization and collective phenomena in ants swarms, communities and brains, among others. Currently he is Research Professor in Northwestern University (Chicago) and in the University of California at Los Angeles UCLA. In 2005 he was the recipient of a Fulbright US Scholar Award (2005), in 2006 the Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, and made Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2007.
For further details please contact Professor Kim Christensen, k.christensen@imperial.ac.uk, 020 7594 7574 .