Emre Aksay

About

Emre Aksay, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Physiology and Biophysics and an Associate Professor of Computational Neuroscience in the Institute for Computational Biomedicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. His research focuses on understanding the molecular, cellular, and circuit mechanisms that give rise to the rich neural dynamics observed in the brain. His work explores neural dynamics, which are critical for motor and cognitive behaviors, by working at the interface between physics and biology. His approach combines molecular-genetic manipulations, electrophysiology, multi-photon imaging, connectomics, statistical and machine learning, computational modeling, and control theory to yield insights into neuronal computations and how neurons interact to generate global brain functions. His research aims to not only advance basic science but also outline therapeutic strategies for disorders of neural dynamics.

Research topics

• Neuroscience
• Computer science
• Biology
• Psychology
• Physics

Selected publications

• A Modeling Framework for Deriving the Structural and Functional Architecture of a Short-Term Memory Microcircuit

  Neuron · 2013-09-01 · 93 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Electron Microscopic Reconstruction of Functionally Identified Cells in a Neural Integrator

  Current Biology · 2017-07-01 · 85 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Spatial Patterns of Persistent Neural Activity Vary with the Behavioral Context of Short-Term Memory

  Neuron · 2015-02-01 · 48 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Structural and Genotypic Scaffold Underlying Temporal Integration

  Journal of Neuroscience · 2015-05-20 · 30 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The accumulation and storage of information over time, temporal integration, is key to numerous behaviors. Many oculomotor tasks depend on integration of eye-velocity signals to eye-position commands, a transformation achieved by a hindbrain cell group termed the velocity-to-position neural integrator (VPNI). Although the VPNI's coding properties have been well characterized, its mechanism of function remains poorly understood because few links exist between neuronal activity, structure, and gen…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Predicting modular functions and neural coding of behavior from a synaptic wiring diagram

  Nature Neuroscience · 2024-11-22 · 25 citations

  articleOpen access

  A long-standing goal in neuroscience is to understand how a circuit’s form influences its function. Here, we reconstruct and analyze a synaptic wiring diagram of the larval zebrafish brainstem to predict key functional properties and validate them through comparison with physiological data. We identify modules of strongly connected neurons that turn out to be specialized for different behavioral functions, the control of eye and body movements. The eye movement module is further organized into t…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CRCNS: Collaborative Research: The Role of Dendritic Processing in Persistent Neural Activity

  NSF · $395k · 2012–2015

• Circuit Mechanisms Underlying Learned Changes in Persistent Neural Activity

  NIH · $4.1M · 2018–2024

• NIH Grant R01EY021581

  NIH · $2.8M · 2018

Frequent coauthors

• David W. Tank

  Princeton University

  53 shared

• H. Sebastian Seung

  Princeton University

  53 shared

• R. Baker

  46 shared

• Guy Major

  42 shared

• Brett D. Mensh

  Howard Hughes Medical Institute

  35 shared

• Theodore H. Schwartz

  24 shared

• Alexandro D. Ramirez

  Cornell University

  24 shared

• Hongtao Ma

  Cornell University

  24 shared

Similar researchers at Cornell University

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• Karsten Suhreh-119
• Harel Weinsteinh-85