Keynote Speaker
“Connectomics in the Developing Nervous System”
Dr. Jeff W. Lichtman
Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology,
Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology,
Harvard University
Dr. Jeff W. Lichtman, M. D., Ph.D. has an AB from Bowdoin (1973), and an M.D. and Ph.D. from Washington University (1980) where he worked until 2004, most recently as Professor of Neurobiology. In 2004 he moved to Harvard where he is a Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. He is also a member of the newly established Center for Brain Science. Lichtman’s research interests revolve around the question of how mammalian brains accommodate information based on their early experiences. He has focused on the dramatic rewiring of neural connections that takes place in early postnatal development. This work has required development of techniques to visualize the patterns of connections in the nervous system and how they are altered over time. He is interested in the mechanics that underlie synaptic competition between neurons that innervate the same target cell. Such competitive interactions are responsible for sharpening the patterns of neural connections during development and may also be important in learning and memory formation. His laboratory studies synaptic competition by visualizing synaptic rearrangements directly in living animal using modern optical imaging techniques. To study the branching patterns of developing circuits and their dynamics he have used transgenic animals in which individual neurons express spectral variants of fluorescent proteins. Branch patterning reorganizations can be monitor in this mice by time-lapse imaging in vivo. He has also randomized the amount of several different fluorescent proteins expressed in individual neurons (Brainbow transgenic mice) to sort out the wiring of many neurons simultaneously. To track axons long distances he developed image processing tools to identify the same axon in multiple images. The reconstructions show many surprises about the ways axons are organized and branch. Recently he developed automated methods for serial electron microscopy to do the same kind of analysis in the central nervous system based on a novel microtome and a scanning electron microscope approach.
