Event Date
UELI RUTISHAUSER, PHD
Professor and Board of Governors Chair in Neurosciences
Department of Neurosurgery and Center for Neural Science and Medicine
Director, Center for Neural Science and Medicine
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA
Faculty Associate in Biology and Biological Engineering
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA
This is an in-person event. Please register here: https://tinyurl.com/Neuroeng-Jun25
Registration for remote attendance is limited to colleagues from the Sacramento campus and those working remotely: https://tinyurl.com/ZoomJun2025
Host: Jie Zheng, PhD, jzjzheng@ucdavis.edu
Abstract
The decisions we make, the memories we form, and the skills we learn define each of us as individual beings. While much has been learned about how circuits of neurons implement simple individual tasks, little is known about how such circuits give rise to human cognition. What defines when an episodic memory begins and ends? How do we bring back to mind the face of a person from memory? Why is maintaining memories in working memory effortful? We are probing these questions by recording from individual neurons in human subjects undergoing neurosurgical procedures, with a focus on the hippocampus, amygdala, and medial frontal cortex. I will discuss the neural substrate of working memory, evidence for generative processes that allow us to re-live past experiences through imagination, and how disentangled abstract representations enable rapid learning and cognitive flexibility. I will also discuss new information geometric tools to quantifying the structure of population codes that have enabled these discoveries. Our findings reveal single-cell correlates of key aspects of human cognition and suggest specific interventions for new treatments for memory disorders.
Bio
Ueli Rutishauser, PhD, is Professor and Board of Governors Chair in Neurosciences in the Department of Neurosurgery, with joint appointments in the Departments of Neurology and Biomedical Sciences. He directs the Center for Neural Science and Medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and holds a joint appointment as a Faculty Associate in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology.
Dr. Rutishauser studied computer science for his BS and received his PhD in Computation & Neural Systems from Caltech. After postdoctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, he started his lab in 2012. Awards include the American Epilepsy Society Young Investigator Award (2007), the Ferguson Award from Caltech (2008), the Troland Award by the National Academy of Sciences (2014), the Next Generation Leader Award by the Allen Institute for Brain Science (2014), the NSF CAREER award (2016), the NIMH BRAINS award (2017), and the Prize for Research in Scientific Medicine (2017). He is an elected member of the Memory Disorders Research Society (2018), co-edited the textbook "Single neuron studies of the human brain" (MIT press) and is one of the organizers of the Human Single Neuron meeting. His work has been published in journals that include Nature, Science, Neuron, Nature Neuroscience, PNAS, Current Biology, PLOS Computational Biology, and Neural Computation.