Visiting lecturer: Nancy Kopell

Nancy Kopell is a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor at Boston University. She was trained in dynamical systems, and has a home in the BU Math Dept. She has worked in the past on the geometry of singularly perturbed systems, on self-organization in chemical systems and other applied math topics. For the last couple of decades she has been mainly interested in neuroscience, and she collaborates widely. Her current interests focus on rapid (1 Hz to 300 Hz) rhythms in the nervous system; the questions concern the physiological bases of the many rhythms in the brain, and how the brain uses these for cognition. She is also working on dynamical problems involving pathological rhythm in Parkinson's Disease and schizophrenia. She has recently organized the Cognitive Rhythms Collaborative, a group of Boston Area scientists interested in all aspects of brain rhythms, from genes to behavior to disease.

Professor Kopell will lecture on some aspects of rhythms in the nervous system. Possible topics include gamma rhythms and schizophrenia, how different rhythms are associated with different ways of creating and manipulating cell assemblies (sets of transiently synchronous neurons), and interaction of rhythms in the nervous system. The relevant mathematics is dynamical systems.