Prof. Israel
Nelken
Department of Neurobiology, Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, The Edmond J. Safra Campus
The Hebrew University Jerusalem 91904, ISRAEL
Curriculum Vitae:
Education:
1979-1982 BSc. in Mathematics and Physics (with special distinction), The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
1984-1985 M.Sc. in Neurobiology (with distinction), Department of Physiology, The Hebrew University - Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem, Israel
1987-1991 Ph.D. in Neurobiology, Department of Physiology, The Hebrew University - Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem, Israel
1991-1994 Postdoctoral fellow, the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD, USA
Positions:
1993-2000 Lecturer, Department of Physiology, The Hebrew University - Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem, Israel
2000-2003 Senior Lecturer (with tenure), Department of Physiology, The Hebrew University - Hadassah Medical School
2003-2005 Senior Lecturer (with tenure), Department of Neurobiology, The Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, Faculty of Sciences, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
2005-2008 Associate Professor, Department of Neurobiology, The Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, Faculty of Sciences, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
2008-present Full Professor, Department of Neurobiology, The Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, Faculty of Sciences, and the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
Other academic roles in the Hebrew University:
1998-2000 Member, M.D. theses committee
2000 - 2001 Member, computer committee of the Hebrew University – Hadassah Medical School
2000 - present Member, the Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computations, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
2003 - 2007 Chairman, the graduate program in Brain and Behavioral Sciences
3/2008 - present Head, Ph.D. program ‘Brain Research: Computation and Information Processing’
2009- Head, Institutional Committee for the Care and Use of Animals (IACUC), Edmond J. Safra Campus
2012- Member, executive committee, Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences
Other academic roles:
1999- Action Editor, The Journal of Computational Neuroscience
2007- Associate editor, Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience
2005-2008 Director, the European course in Neural Computations (Arcachon and Freiburg, together with Nicolas Brunel, Peter Latham and John Rinzel)
3/2010 Member of the Gatsby Unit Quinquennial review committee
2011- Member of the advisory board, Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Munich, Germany
Member of the Israeli Society for Neuroscience (ISFN), Society for Neuroscience (SFN), Association for Research in Otolaryngology (ARO)
Ad-hoc reviewer in Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, PNAS, Journal of Neuroscience, Cerebral Cortex, Journal of Neurophysiology, and others.
Scientific Interests:
I study the coding of natural and naturalistic sounds in the auditory system. My current work centers around the notion of ‘surprise’ – the occurrence of sounds that are unexpected either because they are rare or because they occur at an unexpected location in the sequence. I study responses to surprise at three levels. Phenomenologically, I describe the responses to surprise in different contexts and with different types of sound ensembles in cortex as well as in the preceding stations, in order to find those features of the responses to surprise that are computed specifically in auditory cortex. Mechanistically, apply state-of-the-art imaging and optogenetic techniques to record from multiple neurons simultaneously and to manipulate selectively subclasses of neurons in order to uncover the mechanisms that underlie these responses in auditory cortex. Finally, I collaborate with theoreticians (most fruitfully with Prof. Naftali Tishby) to describe normatively what is exactly surprise and how should responses to surprise depend on the past stimulation sequence. My future work will include recordings in awake rats in naturalistic environments in order to study the role of surprise detection in guiding behavior.