Prof. Howard Gritton, Department of Comparative Biosciences and Neuroscience Program, UIUC will lecture on "Using animal models to reveal the role of cortical oscillations during sensory guided behavior."
Oscillations in cortical circuits are implicated in enhancing sensory stimuli, maintaining focus, filtering potential distractors, and augmenting communication between connected networks. However, the mechanisms that support oscillation generation or how cortical networks utilize oscillations to promote these specific functions is not well understood. Our lab uses electrophysiology in animal models to address these questions. I will describe work from our group across multiple tasks that reveal gamma oscillations in prefrontal networks depends on acetylcholine signaling during cue-guided behavior and that multiregional coordination at alpha/beta frequencies contributes to cognitive flexibility. Finally, I will discuss recent work with collaborators at UIUC showing that oscillations are entrained to attended auditory features and that this attentional representation can be spatially directed in complex auditory environments.
Biosketch:
Dr. Gritton received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Michigan working with Martin Sarter and Terri Lee in the Department of Psychology. His thesis work focused on interactions between acetylcholine, sleep, circadian biology, and learning and memory. In 2013 he joined the lab of Xue Han in the Biomedical Engineering Department at Boston University where he developed new platforms to better reveal the network properties of large neural populations in driving decision making. He led several studies pioneering the use of calcium and voltage imaging indicators, in conjunction with optogenetics and electrophysiology during auditory processing and other natural behaviors. Dr. Gritton joined the Department of Comparative Biosciences in November of 2020 as an Assistant Professor and is also an affiliate member in Bioengineering, Psychology, and in the Neurotechnology for Memory and Cognition Group at Beckman. His work broadly integrates psychology, systems biology, and engineering towards the goal of understanding the processes by which neurons are organized and regulated as functional ensembles. Dr. Gritton's work is currently funded by the NSF and his most recent work focuses on interactions between bottom-up and top-down processes in auditory stream segregation.
