Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Visual Neuroscience

The establishment in 1994 of the Theoretical Neuroscience program within the Center for Neural Science (CNS) has catalyzed the formation of a link between two strong scientific departments at NYU: CNS and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (CIMS). Our overall approach is to integrate as far as possible the research of theoreticians and experimentalists in the study of the brain. This is consistent with the long tradition of the Courant Institute in Applied Mathematics and also is consistent with what we have learned in CNS in our studies in neuroscience---that brain theory needs to be grounded in well-designed experiments, and experimental work needs to be theory driven. This is not an abstract concept or a slogan. It affects every aspect of our program: hiring, training, research. We seek as colleagues theoreticians who are interested in modelling specific experiments, or experimentalists who are experienced in testing theories. We train all our students in experimental techniques of neuroscience research as well as theory. We do research that at its best involves active interaction between theory and experiment.

One special feature of the Program is the "NeuroMonday" seminar series that runs during the academic year. In-house and invited guests discuss current topics of interest to the faculty and students in the Program.

Distinguished theoretical neuroscientists have been invited as visitors to the Program. During the last two years Haim Sompolinsky, Shimon Ullman, Charles Stevens, and Larry Abbott have been in residence at NYU for one or two weeks and have consulted and lectured to the members of the Program.

Research in the program is focused in many promising areas. Some examples of such projects, and their principal investigators, include:

• Single cell studies of orientation tuning and neural network models (David McLaughlin, Michael Shelley, Michael Hawken, Robert Shapley)
• Modeling illusory contour perception and scene segmentation (Davi Geiger, Nava Rubin)
• Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies of visual segmentation (Nava Rubin, Robert Shapley, Davi Geiger)
• Statistical modeling of visual images, with application to image compression and enhancement, as well as texture representation and synthesis (Eero Simoncelli)
• Relationship between visual image statistics and cortical processing ( Eero Simoncelli, J. Anthony Movshon, Peter Lennie)
• Population density models of cortical neural networks (Daniel Tranchina, David McLaughlin)
• Neuronal mechanisms of thalamic visual processing (John Rinzel)

Funding for the center was initially provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In 2001, the Swartz Foundation joined the Sloan Foundation as co-sponsors. In addition to the center at NYU, they jointly fund four other Centers for Theoretical Neurobiology, at California Institute of Technology, The Salk Institute, Brandeis University, and University of California, San Francisco. Members of all five centers gather at an annual summer meeting to discuss current research.