Anthony M. Zador is an American neuroscientist and the Alle Davis Harris Professor of Biology and Chair of Neuroscience at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He is a co-founder, in 2004, of the

Computational and Systems Neuroscience ''Computational and Systems Neuroscience'' (COSYNE or CoSyNe) is an annual scientific conference for the exchange of experimental and theoretical/computational approaches to problems in systems neuroscience. It is an important meeting for computati ...

(COSYNE) conference, and of the NAISYS (Neuroscience to Artificially Intelligent Systems) meeting about the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Dr. Zador's research has focused on understanding the circuits of the auditory cortex in rodents. More recently, he has pioneered a new approach to connectome mapping using the methods of molecular biology, which may dramatically decrease the cost and improve the speed of mapping neuronal circuits at the single cell level.

Biography

Anthony Zador received a B.A. at the

UC, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...

and MD/PhD from Yale University, under the supervision of Tom Brown and Christof Koch at Caltech, focusing on machine learning and computational neuroscience. He carried out postdoctoral research in experimental neuroscience at the Salk Institute with Chuck Stevens before assuming a faculty position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. At CSHL, together with

Zachary Mainen Zachary F. Mainen (born 20 February 1969, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America) is an American neuroscientist whose research focuses on the brain mechanisms of decision-making. Zachary Mainen moved to Lisbon, Portugal in 2007 and has been ...

, he pioneered the use of quantitative behavioral paradigms in rodents to study perception and cognition. In 2012, Dr. Zador proposed a method harnessing advances in

DNA sequencing DNA sequencing is the process of determining the nucleic acid sequence – the order of nucleotides in DNA. It includes any method or technology that is used to determine the order of the four bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. Th ...

to map neural circuits with much higher throughput than conventional microscopy-based approaches. This method promises to reconstruct the connectivity matrices of entire brains with single cell resolution. So far, a variant of this approach has been applied to map the projection patterns single

locus coeruleus The locus coeruleus () (LC), also spelled locus caeruleus or locus ceruleus, is a nucleus in the pons of the brainstem involved with physiological responses to stress and panic. It is a part of the reticular activating system. The locus coerule ...

neurons at the mesoscale, and also to the visual cortex. Zador was recognized as a 2015 Foreign Policy Global Thinker. He is also the winner of the Gill Transformative Investigator Award (2018). He is also an occasional columnist for the Observer, writing on the intersection of science, technology and policy.

References

External links

The Zador Laboratory Website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Zador, Anthony 1964 births Living people American neuroscientists University of California, Berkeley alumni Yale School of Medicine alumni California Institute of Technology alumni