Churchland lab

It is exciting and a little sad to see Watson school students leave for new endeavors. A graduate student from Tony Zador’s lab, Hasana Oyibo, is heading to the FMI in Switzerland to work in Georg Keller’s lab. The Keller Lab has highlighted “mismatch cells” in the visual cortex that respond when a visual stimulus doesn’t match an expected motor output. The existence of these cells is now well-documented, but much remains mysterious about how they acquire their properties. They don’t seem to be innate so something about their visual and movement experiences must enable the circuit that drives their responses. Hasana, an expert in neural circuits, is well-positioned to weigh in on this problem. We will miss her in the Marks Building where her intellectual insights and awesome molecular tools have been of great value to the community.