Mapping Neural Circuits in the Whole Mouse Brain

Neuroanatomy, a century old subject, is currently undergoing a computational technology-driven make-over. Fall in data storage prices as well as automated equipment for digital histology and imaging, has made it possible for entire mammalian brains to be digitized using light microscopy. The talk will describe an ongoing effort to systematically uncover the neural circuit architecture of the whole mouse brain by scaling up classical neuroanatomical methods (http://mouse.brainarchitecture.org). The resulting petabyte-sized data sets are larger than any previously encountered in neuroscience and pose new and interesting data-analysis challenges.

Partha Mitra received his B Sc in physics from Presidency College, Calcutta and his PhD in theoretical physics from Harvard University.  He was an Assistant Professor of Physics at Caltech (1996) and a member of Theoretical Physics department  at Bell Laboratories (1995-2003). He is currently Crick-Clay Professor of Biomathematics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. His research combines experimental, theoretical and computational approaches to gain an understanding of how brains work.