Computational Neuroscience/Modeling

AZA Allsop is an artist, neuroscientist, and psychiatrist who conducts research at the intersection of social cognition, music mindfulness, and psychedelics. His research and clinical work is guided by the belief that decoding these tools will provide a better understanding of how social groups function and offer insights into treating mental suffering and enhancing the evolution of society at large. AZA studied Biology, Philosophy, and Jazz Studies at North Carolina Central University, received his MD from Harvard Medical School, PhD in Neuroscience from MIT and was an Emerson Scholar at Berklee College of Music. He completed his residency in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University where he served as co-chief resident of the Clinical Neuroscience Research Unit and is currently an Assistant Professor in Yale’s Department of Psychiatry and Director of the Center for Collective Healing at Howard University. He teaches meditation, yoga, and music and co-founded Renaissance Entertainment and Mefreely, companies that combine music, science, and community building to drive social change.

Dr. Anticevic trained in Clinical Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis where he trained with Drs. Deanna Barch and David Van Essen. Following graduate training, Dr. Anticevic completed his internship in Clinical Neuropsychology at Yale University. After internship, he joined the Yale University Department of Psychiatry as research faculty while concurrently serving as the Administrative Director for the Center for the Translational Neuroscience of Alcoholism. Subsequently, he was appointed as an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the Yale University School of Medicine, where he directs a clinical neuroimaging laboratory focused on severe mental illness. Dr. Anticevic is a recipient of the NARSAD Young Investigator Award, the International Congress of Schizophrenia Research Young Investigator Award, the NIH Director's Early Independence Award, the NARSAD Independent Investigator Award and the Klerman Prize for Exceptional Clinical Research. He currently serves as the Director of the Division of Neurocognition, Neurocomputation, and Neurogenetics (N3) at Yale School of Medicine.His group's research focus is centered on computational and cognitive neuroscience of mental illness. Specifically, Dr. Anticevic's group is interested in characterizing neural mechanisms involved in higher order cognitive operations, such as working memory, as well as their interaction with neural systems involved in affective processes, with the aim of understanding how these computations may go awry in the context of severe mental illness . Methodologically, his group uses the combination of task-based, resting-state, pharmacological multi-modal neuroimaging, as well as computational modeling approaches to map neural alterations that lead to poor mental health outcomes. The overarching goal of the group is to develop neurobiologically principled and computationally grounded mapping between neural and behavioral levels of analyses in people to inform personalized and rational treatment design for mental health symptoms.

I am an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. My group studies computer architectures and systems for platforms ranging from data center servers to brain-computer interfaces. I am part of Yale's Computer Systems Lab and Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program, and am also a Fellow of Grace Hopper College.Modern computer systems integrate diverse accelerators and memory technologies, offering significant performance but complicating the programming models that software developers are familiar with. We build systems abstractions to improve hardware programmability, and architect hardware and systems software support to implement these abstractions efficiently.We have worked on the virtual memory abstraction with contributions to translation contiguity, memory transistency, and GPU address translation. Our work on coalesced TLBs has been integrated into AMD's chips, and our large page optimizations are now in Linux. Our work on giving GPUs direct access to storage, networking, and memory management services has influenced Radeon Open Compute's hyperscale computing stack. We have also been building heterogeneous architectures that advance the brain sciences to help treat neurological disorders and offer a path towards more explainable and transparent AI. In our HALO project, we are taping out ultra-low-power and flexible chips for brain-computer interfaces and evaluating them using data collected on non-human primates and epilepsy patients.

Dr. Blumenfeld's clinical and research work focuses on epilepsy, cognition and brain imaging. He directs Yale's Clinical Neuroscience Imaging Center (CNIC), a new multi-disciplinary core facility for innovative study and treatment of brain disorders. Teaching activities include a textbook titled Neuroanatomy Through Clinical Cases, Sinauer Assoc., Publ. 2002, 2010, 2020.

Rui Chang received his B.S. in Biological Sciences and Biotechnology from Tsinghua University, China in 2005. He then studied sensory transduction with Emily Liman and earned his Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the University of Southern California in 2011. He completed his postdoctoral training with Stephen Liberles at Harvard Medical School, where he investigated how body sensory cues are monitored by the brain through the vagus nerve, and how these internal signals regulate whole body physiology. He joined both the Department of Neuroscience and the Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Yale University School of Medicine in January 2018.The Chang lab uses state-of-the-art molecular, genetic, and imaging approaches including single-cell gene expression profiling, virus-based anatomical mapping, in vivo imaging, optogenetics, and chemogenetics to reveal the physiological functions of diverse organ-to-brain circuits. The goal is to better understand the important body-brain interface, and to develop novel neuronal-based therapeutic strategies for disease intervention.

Steve Chang is an Associate Professor of Psychology and of Neuroscience at Yale University. He is also a member of the Wu Tsai Institute and the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience at Yale. He is the co-Director of Undergraduate Studies of Yale's Neuroscience (NSCI) major. His research aims to understand the neural circuit mechanisms of social cognition and social decision-making. Major research approaches include using naturalistic social interaction paradigms combined with state-of-the-art behavioral and neural technologies. The ultimate goal of the research program is to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition and to learn how these processes may be disrupted in psychiatric conditions with social deficits.

Dr. Constable received his PhD in Medical Physics from the University of Toronto. He came to Yale as a postdoctoral fellow and has been here since. In addition to being the director of MRI in the Yale Magnetic Resonance Research Center, he runs two parallel labs. One lab is a neuroscience lab focused on mapping the functional organization of the brain through functional MRI measurements and understanding the relationship between this functional organization and behavior. Such developments are leading to new approaches to functionally phenotype individuals with applications in subtyping in brain disorders and disease. Dr. Constable's other lab is focused on the development of novel MRI devices with projects around low field MRI's that can be placed in doctor's offices, with the potential to make MRI much more accessible than it is in it's current form.

Dr. Philip Robert Corlett trained in Experimental Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychiatry with Professors Trevor Robbins and Paul Fletcher at the University of Cambridge. He won a Wellcome Trust Prize Studentship and completed his PhD on the brain bases of delusion formation in the Brain Mapping Unit, Department of Psychiatry. After a short postdoc, he was awarded the University of Cambridge Parke- Davis Exchange Fellowship in Biomedical Sciences which brought him to the Yale University Department of Psychiatry to explore the maintenance of delusions with Professors Jane Taylor and John Krystal. He was named a Rising Star and Future Opinion Leader by Pharmaceutical Marketing Magazine and joined the Yale faculty in 2011 where he will continue to explore the cognitive and biological mechanisms of delusional beliefs as well as predictive learning, habit formation and addiction.

Jonathan Demb is a Professor in the Department of Ophthalmology & Visual Science with secondary appointments in the Department of Cellular & Molecular Physiology and the Department of Neuroscience. Dr. Demb obtained his doctoral degree from Stanford University and did postdoctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania. Demb was a faculty member at the University of Michigan before moving to Yale in 2011. The Demb lab investigates the cellular and synaptic mechanisms that enable visual processing by the mammalian retina. Major accomplishments include identifying fundamental nonlinearities at retinal synapses that mediate specialized spatial processing by retinal ganglion cells; elucidating the role of disinhibition in visual contrast processing; characterizing asymmetries between the retina's ON and OFF pathways; determining roles of NMDA-type glutamate receptors in ganglion cell receptive fields; identifying characteristic properties of cone-mediated vision in the mouse retina; developing the use of a glutamate sensor (iGluSnFR) for study of retinal circuitry; identifying novel amacrine cell circuits using optogenetic technology; and testing experimental therapies in mouse models of retinal disease. Demb is a Reviewing Editor at the Journal of Neuroscience and is on the Editorial Board of PLoS Biology. He was awarded the Cogan Award in 2013 from the Associate for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) to recognize his contributions to the field of retinal neuroscience.

Thierry Emonet is a Professor of Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology & Physics at Yale University. His research combines mathematical modeling and quantitative experiments to understand the biological computations that enable organisms to sense and navigate their chemical environments. As model systems, his lab uses bacterial chemotaxis and fly olfaction, in which they can make multi-scale measurements and compare to quantitative mathematical models. Navigation requires performing many non-trivial computations and can be quantified precisely. The Emonet lab exploits this quantitative framework for discovering how biological systems compute, and how computations are implemented in molecular and cellular mechanisms. Before coming to Yale in 2007, Thierry studied physics at the ETH Zürich. He received his PhD (cum laude) in theoretical astrophysics from the University of La Laguna (Spain) in 1998, before doing postdocs at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder CO and The University of Chicago, discovering key mechanisms that enable magnetic field to float to the surface of the Sun to create Sunspots. During his postdoc Thierry became fascinated with the question of where individuality comes from and what is its functional role in life and he switched to biology. His work is supported by NIH, NSF, the Paul G Allen Family Foundation (Distinguished Allen Investigator), the Whitehall Foundation, the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Outside of science, Thierry’s main interest is art. He grew up at the intersection of science and art and he is married to renowned sculptor Susan Clinard

Irina Esterlis is a clinical neuropsychologist and neuroreceptor imager with extensive training in the application of SPECT and PET to the study of mental illness and comorbid disorders. Dr. Esterlis has developed two novel paradigms to interrogate both the acetylcholine and glutamatergic systems in vivo in human, and these are being currently applied to the study of mood and addiction disorders. She has received awards from Society of Nuclear Medicine, American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, and American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Esterlis' current work includes the study of the metabotropic glutamatergic receptor involvement in bipolar depression and suicide, as well as the effects of depression on synaptic aging. Dr. Esterlis is also initiating new work in the study of neurotransmitter alterations in adolescent depression and suicidality.

Dr. Goldfarb is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology and member of the Wu Tsai Institute. She completed her PhD in Psychology: Cognition & Perception with Dr. Elizabeth Phelps at New York University and a postdoctoral fellowship in the Departments of Diagnostic Radiology and Psychiatry with Dr. Rajita Sinha at Yale. Her research investigates different forms of learning and memory, how stress changes which parts of our experiences we remember, and the impact of memory on later behavior.

Dr. Gruen received his BS and his MD degrees from Tulane University in New Orleans. He has been at Yale since beginning internship training in pediatrics in 1981, which was followed by subspecialty training in neonatology and research training in molecular genetics with Dr. Sherman Weissman. Dr. Gruen formally joined the faculty at Yale in 1988, splitting his time as a neonatology attending in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Yale-New Haven Hospital and his lab where he initially mapped the gene for hemochromatosis. By 2000, the focus of his lab turned to mapping and identifying the reading disability (dyslexia) gene locus on chromosome 6 (DYX2). His lab was the first to generate high-resolution genetic markers, genetic association maps, and gene expression maps of DYX2. These studies led to the identification of DCDC2, a dyslexia gene that was cited by the journal Science as the 5th top breakthrough of 2005. The lab performed an NIH funded clinical study of DCDC2 and other genes related to reading and language in the ALSPAC birth cohort of 10,000 children and mothers. These studies identified the transcriptional control element called READ1, and READ1 alleles that are detrimental and protective for reading disability and language impairment. Dr. Gruen is the principal investigator for the Yale Genes, Reading and Dyslexia (GRaD) Study, a ground-breaking case-control study of dyslexia in 1,400 Hispanic American and African American children recruited from seven sites across North America. He was the Yale site PI for the NIH Pediatric Imaging NeuroGenetics (PING) Data Resource Study of 1,575 normal children, ages 3-20 years. Most recently, Dr. Gruen started the New Haven Lexinome Project, a new six-year longitudinal study of the genetics of response-to-intervention spanning the entire 2015 and 2016 New Haven Public Schools first grade classes. The goals of the New Haven Lexinome Project are to determine risk for learning disabilities conferred by specific genetic variants for presymptomatic diagnosis, and to determine how genetic variants inform intervention for precision/personal education. In addition to his research, Dr. Gruen continues to attend 8 weeks each year in the NICU at the Children’s Hospital at Yale-New Haven. How genes can change language. Short video showing how our genes could account for a substantial amount of the diversity of languages around the world

Dr. Higley studied behavioral neuroscience at Cornell University. He then completed his MD and PhD in the MSTP Program and the laboratory of Dr. Diego Contreras at the University of Pennsylvania. He continued his scientific training as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Bernardo Sabatini at Harvard Medical School. In 2010, Dr. Higley joined the faculty of the Yale Department of Neuroscience and the Program in Cellular Neuroscience, Neurodegeneration, and Repair (CNNR). He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2020. He has received numerous honors for his research, including a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Klingenstein Fellowship, and most recently the NIH Director's Pioneer Award. Dr. Higley has a secondary appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and is a member of the Wu Tsai Institute. He also serves as an Associate Director for the Yale MD-PhD Program.

Humans, by nature, are irrepressibly social and neural mechanisms that underlie real-time social behaviors are not well-understood.  The overarching goal of my research is to address this knowledge gap by discovering the fundamental neural mechanisms that underlie interactive social behaviors. We have developed multi-modal two-person neuroimaging technologies based on near infrared spectroscopy, fNIRS, configured for neural and behavioral measures of real-time live face-to-face and dialogue interactions between humans. Converging evidence from simultaneous measures of neural responses, facial classifications, eye-tracking, pupillometry, EEG, and behavioral reports of subjective effects builds a foundation for a new “neuroscience of two”.   Emerging theoretical frameworks are founded on the interactive brain hypothesis purporting that neural systems during interaction engage processes not engaged during “solo” tasks, and recent findings of cross-brain neural synchrony suggest that brain-to-brain coupled mechanisms underlie social processing. Recent selected publicationsHirsch, J., Noah, J.A., Zhang, X., Dravida, S., & Ono, Y. (2018). A cross-brain neural mechanism for human-to-human verbal communication.  Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 13(9), 907–920.  DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsy070Piva, M., Zhang, X., Noah, J. A., Chang, S. W., & Hirsch, J. (2017). Distributed neural activity patterns during human-to-human competition. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 11, 571. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00571Dravida S., Noah J.A., Zhang X., & Hirsch J. (2020). Joint attention during live person-to-person contact activates rTPJ, including a sub-component associated with spontaneous eye-to-eye contact. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 14(201). doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2020.00201Cañigueral, R., Zhang, X., Noah, J. A., Tachtsidis, I., Hamilton, A., & Hirsch, J. (2020). Facial and neural mechanisms during interactive disclosure of biographical information. NeuroImage, 226, 117572. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117572Descorbeth, O., Zhang, X. , Noah, J.A.,  & Hirsch, J.  (2020). Neural processes for live pro-social dialogue between dyads with socioeconomic disparity. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience,15(8), 875–887. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsaa120 Kelley, M., Noah, J.A., Zhang, X., Scassellati, B., & Hirsch, J. (2020). Comparison of human social brain activity during eye-contact with another human and a humanoid robot. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 7, 209. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2020.599581Hirsch J, Tiede M, Zhang X, Noah JA, Salama-Manteau A and Biriotti M (2021) Interpersonal Agreement and Disagreement During Face-to-Face Dialogue: An fNIRS Investigation. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 14:606397. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2020.606397.Ono, Y., Zhang, X., Noah, J. A., Dravida, S., & Hirsch, J. (2021). Bidirectional connectivity between Broca's Area and Wernicke's Area during interactive verbal communication. Brain Connectivity. doi: 10.1089/brain.2020.0790.Crum J, Zhang X, Noah A, Hamilton A, Tachtsidis I, Burgess P, Hirsch J. An Approach to Neuroimaging Interpersonal Interactions in Mental Health Interventions. Biol Psychiatry Cogn Neurosci Neuroimaging. 2022 Feb 7; 2022 Feb 7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpsc.2022.01.008.

Jonathon (Joe) Howard is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, a Professor of Physics, and a member of the Quantitative Biology Institute at Yale University. He is best known for his research on the mechanical properties of motor proteins and the cytoskeleton, and the development of techniques for observing, measuring and manipulating individual biological molecules. His group studies several cellular systems in which force and motion play key roles, including the motility of cilia, and the branching of developing neurons. Brought up in Australia, where he studied mathematics and neurobiology at the Australian National University, Professor Howard was a professor at the University of Washington Medical School in Seattle, a founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, before moving to Yale 2013 where he enjoys new research projects and teaching.