phone: 212-241-5901

Working with Prof. Dr. Elizabeth C. Cropper at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, my recent projects focus on how sensory cells regulate information. Signals from the environment are not just unconditionally passed on to the central nervous system. A variety of mechanisms selects appropriate information and blocks out unimportant information to reduce the brain's workload.

As these basic mechanisms are mostly universal in animal neurons, I study them in experimentally advantageous model systems, such as the sea slug Aplysia Californica. Besides classical electrophysiology, the direct recording of the neuron's electrical activity, I use optical based techniques that allow visualizing specific aspects of nerve cell activity. In particular calcium imaging has proven extremely useful in uncovering the mechanisms of sensory signal regulation.