I am a post-doc working with Brad Voytek in the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. Action potentials are typically cast as all-or-nothing events by the majority of the neuroscience, systems physiology field. Older studies, however, did actually report what—to me, at least—was a surprising amount of within-neuron variation, along the amplitude, decay, and afterhyperpolarization periods of action potentials, and studies in the early 2000s were instrumental in establishing causal relationships between action potential waveform variance and its downstream consequences. We are exploring how neural circuits might endogenously produce variation in cortical neurons’ action potential waveforms, such that this variation could report the effective presence of neuromodulatory agents influencing cortical activity.
Prior to this project, I characterized hippocampal inhibitory interneuron spike timing with respect to ongoing neural oscillations, with a special focus on potential spike timing variations as a function of behavioral state and olfactory/visuospatial stimuli.