Distinguished Seminar Series with Jeff Lichtman

A central challenge in brain science is the relation between the structure and the function of the nervous system. Modern approaches to this problem get inspiration from the efforts of Cajal, more than 100 years, ago to map neural connections, but his work was insufficient in many ways. Now, with the advent of complete high-resolution descriptions of brain structure in which all the brain's synaptic wiring can in principle be mapped (connectomics), new technical and interpretive problems arise. Currently, whole brain connectomics is just getting underway and many bioengineering and computational challenges will need to be met before entire mammalian brains are mapped at the level of synapses. Perhaps the most significant of these challenges is how we extract understanding from the unprecedented complexity and size of the datasets coming our way.

Jeff W. Lichtman M.D., Ph.D. is Jeremy R Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Ramon y Cajal Professor of Arts and Sciences, and John Harvard Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. He was an undergraduate at Bowdoin College and received and MD and Ph.D. (with Dale Purves) at Washington University in St. Louis in 1980. After a postdoc in the Neurobiology Department at Harvard Medical School, he returned to St. Louis where he stayed before joining the Molecular and Cellular Biology Department at Harvard in 2004. From his graduate work onwards, he has developed approaches to map neural connections at the synapse level. Lichtman's research interest revolves around the question of how mammalian brain circuits are physically altered by experiences, especially in early life. He has focused on the dramatic re-wiring of neural connections that takes place in early postnatal development when animals are doing most of their learning. This work has required development of techniques such as "Brainbow" transgenic mice to visualize neural connections and monitor how they are altered over time. Recently his efforts have focused on developing new electron microscopy methods to map the entire wiring diagram of the developing and adult brain. This "connectomics" approach has as one of its aims uncovering the ways information is stored in neural networks. Current efforts include generation of the first synapse-level full vertebrate connectome (in a fish) and developing approaches for the whole mouse brain connectome.