Research Interest: The main focus of the lab is in the interface between the biophysical properties of individual neurons and neuronal coding. In particular we focus on questions that relate the interaction between nonlinear processes in dendrites and their effect on the way neurons encode information. A key factor of neuronal coding is neuronal noise, both at the cellular level and in the network. Therefore, we are also interested in the interaction between the single neuron and the network in which it is embedded – the effect neuron’s activity on the network as well as the effect of the network’s activity on the neuron. In terms of model system we believe that it is important to consider both sensory systems where stimuli are external to the organism as well as self generated activity. For the first we focus on the barrel cortex in mice and for the latter we are beginning to explore the mouse ultrasonic vocalization motor system as well as prefrontal cortex. We aspire to carry out experiments inspired by theoretical predictions and to combine modeling in order to access aspects of the questions that are not accessible by experiments. We use a variety of advanced techniques in order to answer these questions including: Whole cell patch clamp, Two Photon imaging, Optogenetics, Unltrasonic sound recordings, and computer simulations.