Please note: Henry has left the "CNCS: Center for nonlinear and complex systems" group at Duke University; some info here might not be up to date.
After working in nonlinear dynamics and nonequilibrium pattern formation for many years, my research group has begun studying problems in theoretical neurobiology in collaboration with Professor Richard Mooney's experimental group on birdsong at Duke University. The main scientific question we are interested in is how songbirds learn to sing their song, which is a leading experimental paradigm for the broader neurobiology question of how animals learn behaviors that involve sequences of time. My group is interested in problems arising at the cellular and network levels (as opposed to behavioral levels). One example is understanding the origin, mechanism, and eventually the purpose of highly sparse high-frequency bursts of spikes that are observed in the nucleus HVC of songbird brains (this is the first place where auditory information seems to be combined with motor information). A second example is to understand how auditory and motor information are combined, e.g., there are data that suggests that the same group of neurons that instruct the respiratory and syringeal muscles to produce song (again in nucleus HVC) are also involved in recognizing song. A third example is trying to understand changes in anatomy (increases in spine stability) that were recently observed in living brain tissue as a bird learns its song.
| Office Location: | 097 Physics Bldg, Science Drive, Durham, NC 27708 |
| Office Phone: | (919) 660-2548 |
| Email Address: | |
| Web Page: | http://www.phy.duke.edu/~hsg/ |
| Ph.D. | Princeton University | 1981 |
| MS | Princeton | 1978 |
| M.A. | Princeton University | 1977 |
| B.A. | Harvard University | 1974 |
Current projects: Origin of sparse high-frequency precisely aligned bursts in neurons of the songbird nucleus HVC., How bursts propagate through synfire chains in the presence of noise and in the presence of external signals representing auditory input.
After working in nonlinear dynamics and nonequilibrium pattern formation for many years, my research group has begun studying problems in theoretical neurobiology in close collaboration with Professor Richard Mooney's experimental group on birdsong at Duke University. The main scientific question we are interested in is how songbirds learn to sing their song, which is a leading experimental paradigm for the broader neurobiology question of how animals learn behaviors that involve sequences of time. My group is interested in problems arising at the cellular and network levels (as opposed to behavioral levels). One example is understanding the origin, mechanism, and eventually the purpose of highly sparse high-frequency bursts of spikes that are observed in the nucleus HVC of songbird brains (this is the first place where auditory information seems to be combined with motor information). A second example is to understand how auditory and motor information are combined, e.g., there are data that suggests that the same group of neurons that instruct the respiratory and syringeal muscles to produce song (again in nucleus HVC) are also involved in recognizing song. My group is trying to understand how bursts similar to those observed experimentally propagate through abstract models called synfire chains, but in the presence of noise and in the presence of external signals representing auditory input to nucleus HVC.