Youngmin Park
University of Florida, FL·Mathematics & Statistics
Groups of neurons fire together in rhythms, and those rhythms appear to underpin functions like holding information in short-term memory and tracking where you are in space. Explaining how individual cells organize into collective rhythms usually requires simplifying large brain models down to a few equations, but the standard simplifications assume conditions real brains often violate: that neurons influence each other only weakly, that networks are symmetric, or that cells fire repetitively at a steady rate.
- Fields
Mathematics & Statistics
Neuroscience
Engineering
- Topics
coupled oscillators
neural oscillations
phase-amplitude reduction
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Extend phase-amplitude-based reduced order modeling so that it remains valid for strongly coupled neural oscillators, removing the weak-coupling assumption that limits current coupled oscillator theory.
- Generalize the reduction methods to neural bursters, which fire in clusters of spikes rather than at a steady frequency, and to networks with nonnegligible heterogeneity between cells.
- Develop theory for higher order N-body interactions, in which three or more neurons jointly influence one another, rather than only pairwise coupling.
- Apply the resulting analysis techniques to archival microelectrode recordings from rat entorhinal cortex to identify the dynamical mechanisms governing theta phase precession, the rhythm-relative shift in firing that tracks an animal's location.
More about the research
The resulting idealized models can give an incomplete or outright misleading account of what drives the collective behavior. This project develops reduced mathematical descriptions that remain valid when those assumptions break down.
Why it matters
Several brain disorders, including schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and Parkinson's disease, involve abnormal brain rhythms, and treatments that target rhythms require knowing which network mechanisms generate them. Mathematical tools that work for strongly coupled, heterogeneous neurons could clarify those mechanisms and inform how short-term and spatial memory breaks down in conditions such as Alzheimer's disease.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Horacio Rotstein
New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJ·Neuroscience
Build biophysical computational models of the hippocampal CA1 network that include neurons' intrinsic subthreshold oscillatory properties and medial septum input, and test whether they reproduce theta-frequency local field potential oscillations.
Jean-Marc Fellous
University of California-San Diego, CA·Neuroscience
Characterize whether ventral hippocampal place cells, whose firing zones are too broad to distinguish locations in small arenas, carry useful position information in very large environments, by recording dorsal and ventral hippocampus simultaneously in rats.
James Heys
University of Utah, UT·Neuroscience·Early-career
Test whether axons (nerve fibers) from the anterior cingulate cortex that end in the medial entorhinal cortex carry a clock-like signal of elapsed time, using large-scale optical imaging in mice performing virtual-reality timing tasks.
The school
University of Florida: 65 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 795 research doctorates a year.
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