Center for Theoretical Neuroscience

Center for Theoretical Neuroscience
Name	Center for Theoretical Neuroscience
Established	2000s
Type	Research center
Location	New York City
Parent institution	Columbia University
Director	Michael Long

Center for Theoretical Neuroscience The Center for Theoretical Neuroscience is an interdisciplinary research center that integrates mathematical, computational, and experimental approaches to study brain function. It brings together scholars from Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, California Institute of Technology, and University College London to pursue quantitative models of perception, memory, and decision-making. Faculty and affiliates include investigators affiliated with National Institutes of Health, Simons Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, European Research Council, National Science Foundation, and Wellcome Trust.

History

The center was founded amid growing interest in quantitative neuroscience inspired by work at Salk Institute, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Bell Labs, and The Rockefeller University and influenced by pioneers such as Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, David Marr, and Herman von Helmholtz. Early collaborations tied the center to programs at MIT Media Lab, Max Planck Society, École Normale Supérieure, Pasteur Institute, and Riken. Funding and programmatic development involved grants from National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, and Kavli Foundation. Over time the center hosted symposia with speakers from Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Allen Institute for Brain Science, Wyss Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University Medical Center, and Mount Sinai Health System.

Mission and Research Focus

The center's mission emphasizes bridging theoretical frameworks from Claude Shannon, Shannon's theorem, Kolmogorov complexity, Bayes' theorem, and Fisher information with empirical findings from Hubel and Wiesel, Brenda Milner, Eric Kandel, Rita Levi-Montalcini, and Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Core focus areas include population coding investigated through approaches rooted in Hopfield network, Ising model, Hodgkin–Huxley model, Integrate-and-fire model, and Kalman filter frameworks. Projects examine systems spanning circuits identified in studies by Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts, Donald Hebb, Jerome Lettvin, and Roger Sperry, aiming to account for phenomena reported in experiments by György Buzsáki, György Buzsáki, Idan Segev, and Eve Marder.

Research Programs and Projects

Active programs include computational psychiatry initiatives linked to work by Thomas Insel, Kay Redfield Jamison, Viktor Frankl, and Aaron Beck; sensory systems projects engaging models from David Hubel, Torsten Wiesel, Semir Zeki, and Nancy Kanwisher; and learning and memory studies referencing Timothy Bliss, James McGaugh, Mark Bear, and Richard Morris. Specific projects develop neural network theories invoking Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Jürgen Schmidhuber, and David Rumelhart alongside biologically informed modeling inspired by Eugene Izhikevich, Wulfram Gerstner, Larry Abbott, Haim Sompolinsky, and Terry Sejnowski. Other work addresses decision-making with ties to Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Antonio Damasio, and Joshua Greene and motor control drawing on studies by Stephen Scott, Emanuel Todorov, Reza Shadmehr, and Michael Shadlen.

Faculty and Research Affiliates

Faculty and affiliates include theoreticians and experimentalists recruited from Columbia University, NYU Langone Health, MIT, Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, UC San Francisco, Princeton University, Caltech, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Yale School of Medicine. Notable affiliated investigators have backgrounds connected to awardees such as Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Breakthrough Prize, Lasker Award, Turing Award, and MacArthur Fellows Program. Affiliates collaborate with laboratories led by principal investigators from Eve Marder, Michael Häusser, György Buzsáki, Karl Deisseroth, Edvard Moser, May-Britt Moser, Mala Murthy, Aude Oliva, Joshua Tenenbaum, Pieter Roelfsema, Ila Fiete, Surya Ganguli, Bruno Olshausen, Terrence J. Sejnowski, and Haim Sompolinsky.

Education and Training

Educational initiatives include graduate and postdoctoral training programs coordinated with Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, NYU Graduate School of Arts and Science, Princeton Department of Neuroscience, MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Harvard Department of Psychology, and Stanford Neurosciences Institute. The center offers seminars and workshops featuring speakers from Cognitive Science Society, Society for Neuroscience, Organization for Human Brain Mapping, Neural Information Processing Systems, International Conference on Machine Learning, and Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Short courses reference methodology from Euler, Fourier, Laplace, and statistical frameworks used in works by Bradley Efron, Thomas Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Leo Breiman.

Facilities and Resources

Laboratory facilities house computing clusters with architectures modeled after systems from NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and IBM Watson and make use of imaging platforms comparable to those at Allen Institute for Brain Science and Max Planck Institute for Brain Research. Experimental collaborations integrate electrophysiology rigs, two-photon microscopes, and behavioral setups developed in labs at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Salk Institute, György Buzsáki's lab, and Eve Marder's lab. Data resources include curated datasets akin to those from Human Connectome Project, Allen Brain Atlas, UK Biobank, OpenNeuro, and NeuroMorpho.Org.

Collaborations and Partnerships

The center maintains partnerships with academic institutions such as Columbia University Medical Center, New York University School of Medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine, Rockefeller University, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and international partners including University College London, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Karolinska Institutet, University of Tokyo, and Australian National University. Industry collaborations include joint projects with Google, Microsoft Research, Facebook AI Research, DeepMind, NVIDIA Research, Intel Labs, IBM Research, Amazon Science, and Baidu Research. Funding and programmatic alliances have been formed with Simons Foundation, Kavli Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Gatsby Charitable Foundation, and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Category:Neuroscience research institutes