The Kavli Institute for Neuroscience at Yale will host two major events during the week of Oct. 8, including an all-afternoon workshop.
The workshop, on Wednesday, Oct. 10, from 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. in Brady Auditorium on the School of Medicine campus, will focus on the mechanical mechanisms of neurodegeneration. Its goals are to showcase the breadth of neurodegeneration research at Yale and highlight emerging pathways that contribute to diseases related to neurodegeneration.
Along with seven presentations by Yale faculty will be a keynote address by J. Paul Taylor, MD, PhD, Edward F. Barry Endowed Chair in Cell and Molecular Biology at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Dr. Taylor's talk, titled "Dynamic RNA-protein Assemblies in Neurodegenerative Disease," pertains to the contributions of RNA-protein complexes to such diseases as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia. It begins at 3:00 p.m.
On Thursday, October 11, at 4:00 p.m., in the Anlyan Center Auditorium (room N107), Marla B. Feller, PhD, professor in the Division of Biology, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology & Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, will deliver the Kavli Distinguished Lecture presented by the Department of Neuroscience and the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience at Yale: "Wiring up Direction-selective Circuits in the Retina." Dr. Feller will discuss how circuits are wired up during development to perform specific computations, with particular reference to the retina—which comprises multiple circuits that encode different features of the visual scene, culminating in over 40 different types of retinal ganglion cells. She will describe how direction-selective ganglion cells respond strongly to an image moving in the preferred direction and weakly to an image moving in the opposite, or null, direction.