Larry Abbott, Ph.D.

Larry Abbott is the William Bloor Professor of Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Brandeis University in 1977 and worked in theoretical particle physics at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, CERN and Brandeis. Abbott began his transition to neuroscience research in 1989, joined the Department of Biology at Brandeis in 1993 and was the director of the Volen National Center for Complex Systems at Brandeis from 1997–2002. In 2005, he joined the faculty of Columbia University, where he is currently a member of the Department of Neuroscience, and the Department of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics, and is co-director of the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. Abbott is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a recipient of the National Institutes of Health’s Director’s Pioneer Award, and was awarded the Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience in 2010 and Israel Brain Technologies’ Mathematical Neuroscience Prize in 2013. His research involves the computational modeling and mathematical analysis of neurons and neural networks.

Current Projects:

The representation of internal state in the fly brain

Leveraging dynamical smoothness to predict motor cortex population activity

International Brain Lab

Past Projects:

Higher-level olfactory processing

Understanding neural computations across the global brain

Spatiotemporal structure of neural population dynamics in the motor system