Patrick R. Hof, MD
Regenstreif Professor of Neuroscience
Kastor Neurobiology of Aging Laboratories
Fishberg Research Center for Neurobiology
Mount Sinai School of Medicine

P. Hof is also a founding member of Mount Sinai's Computational Neurobiology and Imaging Center (CNIC). CNIC researchers study the relationships between neural function and structure at levels ranging from the molecular and cellular, through network organization of the brain.This involves the development of new computational and analytic tools for imaging and visualization of 3-D neural morphology, from the gross topologic characteristics of the dendritic arbor to the fine structure of spines and their synapses. Numerical simulations of neural mechanisms based on these structural data are compared with in-vivo and in-vitro electrophysiological recordings.

The group also develops new theoretical and analytic approaches to exploring
the function of neural models of working memory. The goal of this analytic
work is to combine biophysically realistic models and simulations with reduced
mathematical models that capture essential dynamical behaviors while
reproducing the functionally important features of experimental data.

The CNIC is funded jointly by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the
National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National
Institute on Aging and National Institute of Mental Health.

The CNIC also operates an eight-processor SGI Onyx 3400 with 16 GB of RAM and almost two terabytes of storage (http://www.mssm.edu/cnic/pi.html).

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