CHAIRES AISENSTADT

Les titulaires des Chaires Aisenstadt pour le semestre seront John Rinzel (New York) et John Tyson (Virginia Tech).

Série de conférences les 15, 18 et 25 Septembre
John Rinzel, of the Center for Neural Science at New York University, is interested in the biophysical mechanisms and theoretical foundations of dynamic neural computation. With a background in engineering (BS: Univ of Florida, 1967) and applied mathematics (PhD: Courant Institute, NYU, 1973) he uses mathematical models to understand how neurons and neural circuits generate and communicate with electrical and chemical signals for physiological function. He especially relishes developing reduced, but biophysically-based, models that capture a neural system's essence. Before joining the Center for Neural Systems faculty (and jointly that of NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences) in 1997, he was in the Mathematical Research Branch at the NIH in Bethesda for nearly 25 years.

Many of the research projects that people work on in the field of mathematical neuroscience find their origin in work that John already developed some 20+ years ago - such as mode-locking (Keener, Rinzel & Hoppensteadt SIAM paper), Dendrites (along with Rall), waves in excitable media (with Terman, Ermentrout, Miller, ...), bursting, geometric techniques, high-speed auditory processing, and the list goes on. Also, a large number of well known researchers have either worked with John or been hired by him during his NIH time. He is somewhat of a living legend, for example when he carefully points us towards work done by him and/or others in the 60's. And perhaps more than anybody, and in large part due to the great working relationships he establishes with experimentalists, he has promoted the opening-up of the standard neuroscience publications (J. Neuroscience, J. Neurophysiology, plus Science and Nature) to mathematical modeling in neuroscience.


Série de conférences les 22, 24 et 26 septembre
John J. Tyson, University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, received his doctorate in theoretical chemical physics from the University of Chicago under John Light. After postdoctoral work with Manfred Eigen at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Tubingen and at the University of Innsbruck he assumed a faculty position at Virginia. Prof. Tyson is the author or co-author of two books, and over 150 research papers and book chapters. He is recognized as the world leader in developing mathematical models for the regulation of the cell cycle, and his models have inspired a whole generation of mathematical biologists and experimentalists as he has progressively produced models that illuminate and explain the biology. He received the Bellman Prize in 1989, became Doctor honoris causa (Budapest) in 2000, and was named one of Virginia's three outstanding scientists in 2004.