Achievement

Computational and Systems Neuroscientist Stephen Baccus and his graduate student, David Kastner are teaming up with Theoretical Neuroscientist and Physicist Tatyana Sharpee from the Salk Institute in San Diego, CA to develop a theoretical framework to understand a novel population code that Kastner and Baccus have discovered in the retina. This population code enables the retina to circumvent fundamental problems of dynamic encoding by using opposing forms of plasticity that compensate for one another. With Sharpee, Kastner and Baccus are exposing the optimal coding strategy for the retina, given an understanding of the natural input and noise, and relating the theory to the data.