Knierim Lab introduction

Welcome, The Knierim Lab to the MBI:

"Jim Knierim joined the MBI on Feb. 1, 2009. After graduation from Haverford College with a B.A. in psychology, he obtained his Ph.D. in neurobiology at Caltech, where he studied the primate visual system with David Van Essen. He then did a postdoctoral fellowship with Bruce McNaughton at the University of Arizona, where he studied the spatial firing characteristics of place cells and head direction cells of the rat hippocampus and limbic system. In 1998, he started his own laboratory in the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston.

Combining both neurophysiological and computational techniques, the goal of his research is to understand the information processing that occurs in different stages of the hippocampus, from the input representations of the
entorhinal cortex through the different subregions within the hippocampus. It is hoped that these studies will elucidate the mechanisms by which hippocampal representations form the basic organizing framework for episodic
memory formation and retrieval. His laboratory published the first detailed reports of differences in the firing properties of place cells in the CA1 and CA3 regions of the hippocampus and the first demonstration of a dissociation between the medial and lateral areas of the entorhinal cortex in terms of differences in the spatial firing characteristics of their neurons. He is continuing these studies at Johns Hopkins, where he is an Associate Professor in the Solomon Snyder Department of Neuroscience and a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology. He is excited about the prospects of collaboration with the vibrant neuroscience community in the neuroscience, psychology, and biomedical engineering departments at Hopkins.

Current lab members include graduate student Josh Neunuebel, postdoctoral fellows Sachin Deshmukh and Francesco Savelli, and lab manager/research associate Geeta Rao. Another postdoctoral fellow, Joe Monaco, will join the laboratory in July in a collaboration with Dr. Kechen Zhang of the Biomedical Engineering department."