Nancy Kopell Co-director, Center for BioDynamics PhD, Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley, 1967
Department of Mathematics 111 Cummington Street Boston MA 02215 (617) 353-5210 nk@bu.edu

Research Interests

My major current interest is dynamics of the nervous system, especially rhythmic behavior in networks of neurons. Rhythms have been known in the nervous system for about three quarters of a century, but it is still mysterious what biophysical mechanisms produce them, and what functions they serve. In the last decade, there have been many papers linking rhythms at different frequencies to attention, perception, learning and recall, as well as motor behavior. Synchronous assemblies of neurons are thought to be important for distributed processing in the nervous system, including "binding" of activity from different parts of the nervous system, gating incoming signals, potentiating outgoing signals and facilitating plasticity.

Some of the specific projects on which I've worked are discussed in the Neural Dynamics Research page. They include work on the biophysical substrate of network coherence, creation and modulation of cell assemblies, and synchronization across distances. A long-range goal is to understand how the dynamical properties of local networks help to filter and transform the patterned input form other parts of the nervous system, to provide clues to the function of dynamics in the nervous system.

I continue to be interested in Central Patten Generators, networks of neurons that govern rhythmic motor behavior. Another ongoing interest in geometric theory of singularly perturbed systems.

Sample publications

Further information is available at the CBD ongoing research pages. A larger list of Dr. Kopell's publications is also available.

Gloveli T., Dugladze T., Rotstein H., Traub R., Heinemann U., Monyer H., Whittington M. and Kopell N., "Orthogonal arrangement of rhythm generating microcircuits in the hippocampus", PNAS 102:13295-300 (2005)

Steve Kunec and Michael E. Hasselmo and Nancy Kopell "Encoding and Retrieval in the CA3 Region of the Hippocampus: A Model of Theta-Phase Separation ", J Neurophysiol 94:70-82 (2005)

Horacio G. Rotstein, Dmitri D. Pervouchine, Corey D. Acker, Martin J. Gillies, John A. White, Eberhardt H. Buhl, Miles A. Whittington, and Nancy Kopell "Slow and fast inhibition and an h-current interact to create a theta rhythm in a model of CA1 interneuron network ", J Neurophysiol 94:1509-1518 (2005)

Christoph Börgers and Steven Epstein and Nancy J. Kopell "Background gamma rhythmicity and attention in cortical local circuits: A computational study ", PNAS 102(19):7002-7007 (2005)

Mette S. Olufsen, Miles A. Whittington, Marcelo Camperi, Nancy Kopell "New Roles for the Gamma Rhythm: Population Tuning and Preprocessing", J. Comput. Neurosci 14:35-54 (2003)

N. Kopell and G.B. Ermentrout "Mechanisms of phase-locking and frequency control in pairs of coupled neural oscillators", Handbook on Dynamical Systems: Toward applications. Ed. B. Fiedler, Elsevier 2:3-54 (2002)