NEUROETHOLOGY OU PRESIDENTIAL DREAM COURSE LECTURE
Sponsored by the OU President's Office, CBN, & the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
Joseph Fetcho
Professor, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior
Cornell University
"USING TRANSPARENT ANIMALS AND FLUORESCENT NERVE CELLS TO UNDERSTAND THE BRAIN AND BEHAVIOR"
7 PM, Thursday, October 21, Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, 2401 Chautauqua Ave., Norman, OK 73072
There is an ongoing revolution in the ability to look into the brain to literally watch what nerve cells are doing as an animal behaves and control the activity of those nerve cells with light flashes. The talk will focus on these remarkable tools and how they can be used to figure out how behaviors are produced and how one can fix the nervous system after it is damaged.
Dr. Fetcho is a Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University. He used electrophysiological, morphological, and pharmacological approaches to reveal brain and spinal cord mechanisms of escape behaviors in goldfish. Then he pioneered the use of larval zebrafish to image the simultaneous activity of many brain and spinal cord neurons. He has since added molecular genetic methods to his arsenal. In recent years, he and his colleagues have revealed the roles of specific types of neurons in multiple behaviors. Fetcho’s numerous and in-depth articles include publications in Science, Nature, Nature Neuroscience, and Neuron.