Churchland lab

Today marked the last meeting of our summer long “Gilbert Club”, a group that gathers weekly to discuss the Gilbert Strang lectures available on MIT Open Courseware. Most folks who have taken linear algebra know and love the Strang textbook- his lectures will also not disappoint. We gathered after watching each lecture in the hopes of using it as a jupming-off point for developing new techniques to interpret neural data from both electrophysiological recordings and imaging. The challenge is that the temporal precision and noise can differ greatly across these two methods for measuring neural activity, such as electrophysiology and imaging. Techniques discussed include regression, dimensionality reduction and image processing. The club was led by Matt Kaufman, a postdoc in my lab who has been a major player in bringing new analysis techniques to neural data. Attendees included students and postdocs from my lab as well as the Albeanu, Koulakov and Zador labs.

One clear outcome of the club is that scientists here working on different problems now have a common language for discussing the data. My hope is that this could constitute a first step in generating not just a common language, but a common data format and a common set of analysis tools as well. The opportunity to share data and analyses easily would make each of our individual efforts go much further, and could help to unify broad approaches here at CSHL.