Events on March 3, 2017
David C. Van Essen , Alumni Endowed Professor Department of Neuroscience Washington University in St. Louis Presents:
Human Cerebral Cortex: Structure, Function, Connectivity, Development, and Evolution
March 3, 2017 at 2:00pm for 1hr
Evans Conference Room, WEB 3780
Warnock Engineering Building, 3rd floor.
David C. Van Essen received his undergraduate degree from the California Institute of Technology and his doctorate from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral fellow in Boston, Norway and England before joining the Caltech faculty in 1976. In 1992 he moved to Washington University in St. Louis and chaired the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology for two decades.
Dr. Van Essen is internationally known for his research on the structure, function, connectivity, evolution, and development of cerebral cortex in humans and nonhuman primates. His tension-based theory of morphogenesis accounts for how and why the cortex gets its folds. His laboratory has developed powerful methods of computerized brain mapping, with a particular emphasis on surface-based visualization and analysis of cerebral cortex. He has been a pioneer in neuroinformatics and data sharing efforts for nearly two decades. He has written more than 200 peer-reviewed articles and invited publications.
Dr. Van Essen was a Principal Investigator of the Human Connectome Project (HCP), a highly successful endeavor to map brain function and connectivity in healthy young adults. He is currently a PI on two Lifespan HCP consortium projects. He has been a leader in two major professional societies, serves on several advisory boards, and is a Senior Editor for eLife. He is a Fellow of the AAAS and has received many awards, including several for teaching excellence.
Abstract:
The cerebral cortex is the dominant structure of the mammalian brain, and it plays critical but diverse roles in cognition, perception, emotion, and motor control. This lecture will review recent progress in elucidating the structure, function, connectivity, development, and evolution of cerebral cortex in humans and nonhuman primates. Underlying methodological themes will include the power of surface-based analysis and visualization and the importance of user-friendly data sharing for accelerating progress in exploring these issues. Consideration of cortical development will include questions of why the cortex is a sheet whose convolutions vary across species and across individuals. Advances in elucidating functional organization include a recent multimodal human cortical parcellation, based on data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP), that reveals 180 distinct areas in each hemisphere. The ability to accurately parcellate the cortex in individual subjects will enable systematic analyses of individual variability in relation to many neurobiologically informative features as well as hundreds of behavioral measures that are part of the freely shared HCP data. Comparisons with nonhuman primates, including chimpanzees as well as macaque monkeys, provide intriguing evolutionary insights regarding the dramatic expansion of neocortical regions associated with higher cognition in the human lineage.
Posted by: Deb Zemek