Karel Svoboda
Karel Svoboda
Karel Svoboda graduated from Cornell University with a BA in Physics and from Harvard University with a PhD in Biophysics. He was a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories and a principal investigator at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He was a Senior Group Leader at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus. Currently he is the Vice President and Executive Director of the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA).
Karel Svoboda’s work is focused on the structure, function and plasticity of cortical circuits in behaving mice, mainly in the context of tactile sensation and decision-making based on tactile evidence. By recording from and manipulating defined cell types, his lab analyzes the information flow in cortical circuits. Current areas of investigation include: i) the neural code underlying haptic sensation in the somatosensory cortex at the level of individual spikes; ii) the mechanisms of motor planning, short-term memory, and movement execution in the motor cortex and motor thalamus; iii) development of new optical, molecular, and behavioral methods for systems neuroscience.
The Brain Prize 2015 is also awarded to:
