Vinícius Lima – ESR 5

I did an undergrad in Physics applied to medicine and biology at the University of Sao Paulo, in Brazil. During that time, I started to participate in meetings in the laboratory of neural systems and to do research in a “scientific initiation” project, as it is called here. The focus of the laboratory was mostly in computational neuroscience, which means that our work consisted of creating and simulating mathematical models of neurons, and cortical networks to study brain phenomena.

Even though at the beginning I was mostly interested in the programming part of the research, and to find a solution to implement the mathematical models, I quickly got interested in the neuroscience’s mysteries that are yet to be solved.

During my masters, my project was focused on studying the influence of a particular type of neuron model, in which the dynamics determining the occurrence of an action potential at a given time is probabilistic, hence named “stochastic neuron model”, in different network topologies.

In my Ph.D. project, the focus switched to data analysis. In particular, I will use neuronal activity data registered from monkeys during an experiment where the subject has to memorize a visual cue to be rewarded. To analyze the data we will use tools from network analysis, and information theory to determine how the information about the environmental cues shown to the monkey is maintained in the brain.

Vinícius Lima – ESR 5

ESR 5

Journal Entries 14