Fermilab offers a public lecture series on a wide range of topics presented by experts in their respective fields.

Lectures cost $7 and are usually on Friday evenings beginning at 8 p.m. in Ramsey Auditorium. Lectures are general admission seating, and frequently sell out.  Click here for details and tickets.

Connectomics: Mapping the Brain Dr. Jeff Lichtman, Harvard University

Connectional maps of the brain may have value in developing models of both how the brain normally works and how it fails when subsets of neurons or synapses are missing or misconnected. Such maps might also provide information about how brain circuits develop and age. I am eager to obtain such maps in neonatal animals because of a longstanding interest in the ways neuronal circuits are modified during early postnatal life. Some work in my laboratory has focused on obtaining complete wiring diagrams of the projections of peripheral motor and autonomic axons in young and adult muscles. This work has been aided by the development of transgenic mice in which individual axon projections are traced by virtue of their expression of a unique ratio of several different fluorescent proteins.  We think this effort provides insights into the way mammalian nervous systems mold themselves in response to experience. In contrast to the peripheral nervous system, the high density of neuropil in the brain is overwhelming. One strategy to see through the dense wiring is to use new generations of Brainbow technology that allow more selective imaging of particular classes of central neurons. But in order to see the full details of central circuits other technologies may have to be employed. My colleagues and I have developed an automated electron microscopy approach in which we collect tapes containing of tens of thousands of 30 nm thick brain sections and then use automated computational methods to image them at high resolution. The image data is then amenable to automatic segmentation by new computational algorithms. We are hopeful that this imaging pipeline will make large scale connectomic analysis of brain circuits more routine.

Jeff Lichtman is Jeremy R. Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Santiago Ramon y Cajal Professor of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. He received an AB from Bowdoin (1973), and an M.D. and Ph.D. from Washington University (1980) where he worked for 30 years before moving to Cambridge in 2004. He is a member of the newly established Center for Brain Science. Lichtman'€™s research interest revolves around the question of how mammalian brain circuits are physically altered by experiences, especially in early life. He has focused on the dramatic re-wiring of neural connections that takes place in early postnatal development when animals are doing most of their learning. This work has required development of techniques such a "Brainbow"€ transgenic mice to visualize neural connections and monitor how they are altered over time. Recently his efforts have focused on developing new electron microscopy methods to map the entire wiring diagram of the developing and adult brain. This "connectomics" approach has as one of its aims uncovering the ways information is stored in neural networks.