Eyal Seidemann received his undergraduate and Master's degrees from Tel Aviv University in Israel. Dr. Seidemann conducted his graduate studies in Bill Newsome's lab at Stanford University and obtained his PhD in Neuroscience in 1998. He then pursued his postdoctoral work with Amiram Grinvald at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, where he was the first recipient of the Koshland Scholarship. Dr. Seidemann joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in the Fall of 2002. He is currently a Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology and a member of the Center for Perceptual Systems and the Institute for Neuroscience.

Research Summary:

The overarching goal of research in my lab is to understand how perceptual decisions and motor plans are represented and processed in the primate cerebral cortex. To address these questions, we employ a novel and unique combination of optical, genetic and electrophysiological techniques to measure ("read") and manipulate ("write") neural responses in awake, behaving primates. Our ability to record optically from the cortex of alert animals puts us in a unique position; it allows us to directly visualize cortical activity in real-time, while subjects perform demanding perceptual or motor tasks. We then build computational models that attempt to explain how the measured neural activity could lead to the observed behavior. Finally, we test the predictions of these quantitative models by measuring how perceptual decisions or motor plans change following selective manipulations of the neural response using precise optical, electrical or pharmacological manipulations.