Sleep and Memory
- Speaker
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Loren Frank, Ph.D.University of California, San Francisco
Presidential Lectures are free public colloquia centered on four main themes: Biology, Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science, and Neuroscience and Autism Science. These curated, high-level scientific talks feature leading scientists and mathematicians and are intended to foster discourse and drive discovery among the broader NYC-area research community. We invite those interested in the topic to join us for this weekly lecture series.
Sleep is often thought of as an “offline” state, but in reality, the brain is actively processing memories when we sleep.
In this talk, Loren Frank will present an overview of what we know about memory and sleep. He will then present work from his laboratory that explores how memory-related activity in animals differs between awake and sleep states and how sleep contributes to memory formation. This work highlights the interactions between the hippocampus and other brain areas that allow the brain to form memories and store them long-term.
About the Speaker
Frank is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and a professor in the departments of physiology and psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He is also the director of the Kavli Institute for Fundamental Neuroscience at UCSF. Frank received his B.A. in psychology and cognitive studies from Carleton College and his Ph.D. in systems neuroscience and computation from MIT. He conducted post-doctoral research at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University. His laboratory uses a combination of techniques to study the neural bases of learning, memory and decision-making.