Ann Kennedy

Thursday 30th May 2019

Time:4.00pm

Ground Floor Seminar Room

25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG

Computational Insights into Neural Representations, Learning, and Behavior

In order to successfully survive and reproduce, animals must produce a diverse range of innate and learned behaviors in a flexible and context-dependent manner. The computational task of forming an internal representation of an animal’s environment and translating that to the selection of goal-directed actions is dependent on the coordinated activity of multiple brain areas. In this talk, I will show how analysis and modeling of neural activity from different neural circuits can reveal how an animal’s external and internal environments are represented in diverse brain areas, providing insight into how diverse computations are performed by the brain. First, by modeling neural representations in the mushroom body of the Drosophila olfactory system, I find that similarities between odor representations impose constraints on the fly’s capacity for associative learning. These constraints can be overcome by a certain class of model learning rules, which make concrete predictions of neural dynamics during learning. Second, I will present microendoscopic imaging data from hypothalamic circuits in behaving mice, in conjunction with automated pose estimation and behavior classification, and show how analysis of these data has reshaped our understanding of the role of hypothalamus in the control of social and fear behaviors.

Bio:
Ann Kennedy received her Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Behavior from Columbia University in 2014, where she worked with Larry Abbott and collaborators Nate Sawtell and Richard Axel to model learning in two cerebellum-like structures: the electrosensory lobe of the mormyrid electric fish, and the Drosophila mushroom body. She then pursued a postdoctoral position as the resident theorist in the lab of David Anderson at Caltech, where she works with lab members in analyzing, interpreting, and modeling the neural dynamics of hypothalamic nuclei that govern innate survival behaviors. She also collaborates with Pietro Perona and Yisong Yue at Caltech to track and model the actions of interacting animals, in an effort to better understand brains by first understanding in more detail the behaviors they are generating.