Patrick Roberts

Adjunct Professor, Dept. of Physiology and Pharmacology

Adjunct Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering

Dr. Patrick Roberts is a theoretical neuroscientist who specializes in the development of mathematical methods, both analytical and computational, to study dynamics of neural activity patterns, and to help understand the relationship between those dynamics and behavior. Using mathematical methods drawn from statistical physics, the specific areas of research are:

1. The storage of temporal patterns in cerebellum-like structures: the dynamics of synaptic plasticity at the site of initial electrosensory information processing in mormyrid electric fish.

2. Dynamics of neural activity in the cerebellum: test various hypothetical mechanisms underlying neuronal activity patterns in the cerebellum. The modeling effort will help to bridge the gap between cellular- and systems-level experimental findings.

3. Biological learning rules: to analyze the neural dynamics that result from different biological learning rules. Since the timing relations of biological learning rules result from molecular events at the synapse, this line of research helps to link the implications of dynamics at the molecular level, through dynamics at the network level, to the behavior of whole organisms.

Roberts PD & Bell CC. "Spike Timing Dependent Synaptic Plasticity in Biological Systems", Biol. Cybern. 87, 392-403 (2002) (PDF) The original publication is available at http://link.springer.de or at http://link.springerny.com.

Roberts PD. "Computational consequences of temporally asymmetric learning rules: I. Differential Hebbian learning", J. Compu. Neurosci. 7: 235-246 (1999)

Roberts PD & Bell CC. "Computational consequences of temporally asymmetric learning rules: II. Sensory image cancellation". J. Compu. Neurosci. 9: 67-83 (2000)