Curriculum Vitae June 7, 2016 ATTILA LOSONCZY, M.D., Ph.D. Born: November 17, 1974, Nagykanizsa, Hungary Associate Professor (tenured) Department of Neuroscience Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute Kavli Institute for Brain Science Columbia University 701 W168th street, HHSB, rm. 510B, New York, NY, 10032, United States (T) 212-305-3041 (E)
[email protected] (W) www.losonczylab.org FIELD OF SPECIALIZATION My research program is aimed at understanding how mammalian cortical circuits mediate learning and formation of declarative memories – our repository of acquired information of people, places, objects and events. While our sensory experience of the world is broad and continuous, memory is specific, consisting of stored representations of a few important events. Whereas most of our experience is forgotten, memory formation is usually restricted to salient events (‘episodes’), allowing us to remember the situations where good or bad events occurred to allow us to approach or avoid them in the future. In mammals, the selective transformation of transient experience into stored memory first occurs in the hippocampus, which develops representations of specific events in the context in which they occur. Despite substantial advances in our understanding of where memory is formed, little is known about how the hippocampal circuitry initially selects, processes and stores salient memories. My laboratory uses functional imaging, electrophysiology, behavioral analysis, manipulation, and computational modeling to dissect the functional role of hippocampal excitatory, inhibitory and modulatory neural circuits in memory storage and recall. My research focuses on the mouse hippocampus, where this degree of understanding appears to be within reach, owing to new technologies, such as functional imaging and optogenetics, which allow us to observe and manipulate identified elements of the mammalian memory circuitry (Lovett-Baron, 2012, 2014; Kaifosh, 2013, 2014, 2016; Danielson, 2016a,b; Reardon, 2016; Basu 2016).