Warren Center Distinguished Lecture: Olaf Sporns

Title: Network Neuroscience

Abstract: Recent advances in network science have greatly increased our understanding of the structure and function of many networked systems, ranging from transportation networks, to social networks, the internet, ecosystems, and biochemical and gene transcription pathways.  Network approaches are also increasingly applied to the brain, at several levels of scale from cells to entire nervous systems. Early studies in this emerging field of brain connectomics have focused on mapping brain network topology and identifying some of its characteristic features, including small world attributes, modularity and hubs. More recently, the emphasis has shifted towards linking brain network topology to brain dynamics, the patterns of functional interactions that emerge from spontaneous and evoked neuronal activity.  I will give an overview of work characterizing the structure of complex brain networks, with particular emphasis on studies demonstrating how the network topology of the connectome constrains and shapes its capacity to process and integrate information.

Bio: Dr. Olaf Sporns is a Distinguished Professor, Provost Professor, and the Robert H. Shaffer Chair at  Indiana University Bloomington. Dr. Sporns received his B.A. from Universitat Tubigen in Germany in 1986 and his Ph.D at Rockefeller University. His areas of study include Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, and his research topics are in Computational and cognitive neuroscience, connectomics, network models of the human brain, brain networks across the computational models of brain dynamics, and embodied cognitive science. Visit his website: http://psych.indiana.edu/faculty/osporns.php