Dr. Gideon Rothschild is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology, the Kresge Hearing Research Institute and the Michigan Neuroscience Institute. He received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Computational Biology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he also continued to pursue a PhD in Neuroscience. He did his post-doctoral work in the lab of Loren Frank at the University of California, San Francisco.
The Rothschild lab is interested in revealing how information is processed in the brain via precisely coordinated activity patterns of populations of hundreds of interacting neurons in the living brain. In particular, the lab is very interested in the neural-network mechanisms by which the brain transforms salient but often momentary sensory experiences into long-term memories, and in turn, how existing memories and the behavioral state of the animal shape processing of incoming sensory input.
To pursue these questions, the Rothschild lab combines densely sampled electrophysiological single-unit recordings from freely behaving and naturally sleeping rodents, two-photon calcium imaging during behavior, closed-loop modulation of neural activity, chemogenetic modulation of specific projection pathways, and computational analyses.
The image is a two-photon micrograph from a couple hundred neurons in the primary auditory cortex of a behaving mouse. The image is derived from time-averaging, but the actual data shows complex patterns of fluorescence of individual neurons, which reflect their spiking activity. Two photon calcium imaging is one method we use in the lab, alongside eletrophysiology, to measure population-level neural activity patterns.