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lmazzuca - at - uoregon - dot - edu
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University of Oregon, Eugene

Welcome to the Mazzucato Lab
Our lab is focused on elucidating the neural basis of sensory perception, decision-making, and associative learning.
  • How does behavior emerge from the complex temporal interactions of cortical and subcortical  networks? 
  • How do different physiological states, such as arousal, disengagement, expectation, affect sensory processing and modulate an animal's behavior?
  • What drives associative learning at the level of synaptic plasticity in cortical and subcortical circuits?

To study these and other questions, we use methods from statistical physics, information theory, machine learning, and dynamical systems. We combine analysis of neurophysiological data from large populations of neurons in behaving animals with theoretical models based on neural networks.
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Our lab is passionate about creating an inclusive environment promoting diversity. We embrace a notion of intellectual community enhanced by diversity along a number of dimensions, including race, ethnicity and national origins, gender identity and presentation, disability, class and religion. We aim at fostering greater creativity and encouraging collaborative innovation and interactions.​
Learn more about research in our lab at this fun SciencePub talk:

Lab News

09 30 2020
The lab is participating (virtually) to Bernstein Conference 2020 with three posters:
08 18 2020
Luca is appearing at the virtual SciencePub on 8/18 at 5:30pm with neuroscience trivia, a popular science talk, and discussion with the audience: Searching for the origin of time in the brain.
08 03 2020
The Neuromatch Academy mentoring program was a resounding success, with several pods mentored by Luca obtaining great results and making awesome presentations, including these two:
- Finding hidden states in human fMRI data.
- Hierarchical Organization of Orientation Encoding in the Mouse Visual Cortex
07 13 2020
The lab attends the Neuromatch Academy for the next three weeks! Luca mentors student projects on population dynamics and attractor networks.
07 01 2020
The lab is participating (virtually) to ICMNS 2020 with one talk and two posters:
  • Merav Stern will talk about "Emergence of Slow Timescales In Highly Chaotic Random Neural Networks" as a Poster Prize winner!
  • Poster 1: "Emergence of Slow Timescales In Highly Chaotic Random Neural Networks" by M. Stern, N. Istrate, and L. Mazzucato
  • Poster 2: "State-dependent control of cortical processing speed via gain modulation" by D. Wyrick and L. Mazzucato
Our lab will take part to the Academic strike in support of Black lives on June 10th 2020. We will abstain from academic activities and devote our lab meeting to discussing data on systemic racism in academia and concrete ways to address it in our practices.

Here is an explanation of what it means to strike, a FAQ, and an awesome list of resources on fighting racism in academia. The preprint server arxiv.org will participate in the strike as well thus amplifying the action worldwide. This is a link to the form pledging your support.
05 08 2020
New paper "Hippocampal Network Reorganization Underlies the Formation of a Temporal Association Memory" in collaboration with the Losonczy and Fusi lab published in Neuron.
05 01 2020
New preprint by David Wyrick with the Smear and Ahmadian labs on the biorxiv:  "Sniff-synchronized, gradient-guided olfactory search by freely moving mice."
04 28 2020
Luca gives a virtual talk at the lab of Julijana Georgieva @ Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt.
04 08 2020
New preprint from the lab on the biorxiv:  "State-dependent control of cortical processing speed via gain modulation" by David and Luca.
03 16 2020
Our lab moved all operations online using remote videoconferencing to comply with the COVID-19 containment policies. Everybody works from home!
03 06 2020
Nicu gives a remote talk at the APS March Meeting presenting our latest results: "Heterogeneity of timescales in recurrent networks with clustered connectivity" in collaboration with Merav Stern.
02 23 2020
The lab is going to Cosyne 2020 to present three posters:
  • "Metastable attractors explain the variable timing of stable behavioral action sequences" by
    S. Recanatesi*, U. Pereira*, M. Murakami, Z. Mainen* and L. Mazzucato*
  • "Controlling processing speed in cortical circuits via gain modulation" by D. Wyrick and L. Mazzucato
  • "Heterogeneity of timescales in recurrent networks with clustered connectivity" by N. Istrate, M. Stern and L. Mazzucato
02 05 2020
Luca's tutorial and seminar at the Simons Workshop available online:
  • "Metastable attractors explain the variable timing of stable behavioral action sequences" [video] [slides]
  • "Tutorial on modeling and simulating neural population dynamics" [video]
02 05 2020
All videos and slides of talks at our Workshop on Physics of neural circuits and network dynamics @ Simons Center for Geometry and Physics.
01 26 2020
New preprint from the lab on the biorxiv:  "Metastable attractors explain the variable timing ofstable behavioral action sequences."
Great collaboration between theorists (Stefano from our lab + U. Pereira @ NYU) and experimentalists (M. Murakami + Z. Mainen @ Champalimaud).
01 01 2020
Lab in the news:
Quanta Magazine: This Year in Biology
10 18 2019
Nicu passes the Advance to Candidacy exam at the Physics Department, congratulations!
10 14 2019
David and Luca will fly to Jülich, Germany, in April 2020 to give a Tutorial on data analysis methods at the Advanced Neural Data Analysis Course.
10 10 2019
Mahboubeh Khoddam joins the lab for a Fall rotation (co-supervised with David McCormick). Very excited to work with her on analyzing whole brain activity during behavior!
09 17 2019
Big turnout at our Bernstein Workshop on "Cortical computations via metastable activity"
09 10 2019
New tutorial on spiking network simulations and Hidden Markov Model analyses
for the Summer School on Computational Neuroscience in Venice. Including customizable demo scripts for E-I clustered networks and a data analysis suite with simple examples.
06 19 2019
New review published on Current Opinion in Neurobiology:
"Cortical computations via metastable activity" in collaboration with the La Camera and Fontanini labs.
04 28 2019
Proposal accepted for a Bernstein Workshop on "Cortical computations via metastable activity" 
​September 17-18, 2019, in Berlin
04 18 2019
New biorxiv paper out
"Hippocampal network reorganization underlies the formation of a temporal association memory," in collaboration with the Fusi and Losonczy labs.
04 01 2019
New paper accepted in Nature Neuroscience
Sensory stimuli are recognized faster when they are expected. Comparing a spiking network model to cortical recordings from behaving animals, We showed that expectation accelerates sensory processing by modulating the intrinsically generated activity preceding stimulation.
04 01 2019
New "Artificial Intelligence and the Brain" Program at UO
Visitor program at the Institute of Neuroscience kicks off in April with Stefano Recanatesi (UW) and Gabe Ocker (Allen)
03 04 2019
Talk at the Cosyne Workshops "Why spikes"
03 04 2019
Proposal accepted for a Simons Workshop on the "Physics of neural circuits and network dynamics"  
January 27-31 2020 at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, Stony Brook.
Proposal accepted for a Simons Center Program on the "Neural networks and the Data Science Revolution: from theoretical physics to neuroscience, and back"
 
January 2020 at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, Stony Brook.