Sleep and Memory
- Speaker
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Loren Frank, Ph.D.University of California, San Francisco
Presidential Lectures are a series of free public colloquia spotlighting groundbreaking research across four themes: neuroscience and autism science, physics, biology, and mathematics and computer science. These curated, high-level scientific talks feature leading scientists and mathematicians and are designed to foster discussion and drive discovery within the New York City research community. We invite those interested in these topics 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.