“The Ups and Downs of Homeostatic Plasticity”
The 34th Annual C. R. Stephen Lecture is hosted by the Department of Anesthesiology. The C.R. Stephen Lectures honor the first chair of the anesthesiology department at the School of Medicine, C. Ronald Stephen, MD, FFARCS.
Short bio: Gina G. Turrigiano, PhD, is the Joseph Levitan Professor of Vision Science in the Department of Biology, at Brandeis University where she teaches biology, and studies cellular and molecular neuroscience.
Over the past 20 years, Dr. Turrigiano’s Lab has uncovered a family of homeostatic plasticity mechanisms, including synaptic scaling, that work together to maintain the integrity of neural circuits to “self-tune” and stabilize network activity during periods of intense synaptic rearrangements. Her work has been instrumental in understanding neurological disorders, such as epilepsy and autism spectrum disorders, that arise from aberrant circuit excitability.
More recently, the Turrigiano Lab has focused on the role of homeostatic plasticity in the experience-dependent development of the neocortex, specifically to understand how homeostatic mechanisms interfere in memory consolidation and other sleep-dependent processes.
Dr. Turrigiano received a Bachelor of Art in Biology at Reed College and a doctorate in neurosciences at the University of California San Diego. She trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Brandeis University before joining the faculty as a professor in 1994. Dr. Turrigiano is currently a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science; additionally, she is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Turrigiano has co-published hundreds of scientific papers in prestigious journals—such as the Journal of Neuroscience and Nature Neuroscience—and has received numerous awards for her pioneering research including the MacArthur Fellowship, the McKnight Foundation Technological Innovation in Neuroscience Award, the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the HFSP Nakasone Award in Frontier Sciences, and the Javitz Neuroscience Investigator Award. Most recently, Dr. Turrigiano received the NINDS R35 Research Program Award for her project “Mechanisms and function of firing rate homeostasis in cortical circuits.”
For inquiries contact Maureen Arends.