Events Calendar

AME Seminar

Speaker: Jeff Moehlis, Professor and Chair, Department of Mechanical Engineering University of California at Santa Barbara

Talk Title: Controlling Populations of Neural Oscillators

Abstract: Many challenging problems that consider the analysis and control of neural brain rhythms have been motivated by the advent of deep brain stimulation as a therapeutic treatment for a wide variety of neurological disorders. In a computational setting, neural rhythms are often modeled using large populations of coupled, conductance-based neurons. Control of such models comes with a long list of challenges: the underlying dynamics are nonnegligibly nonlinear, high dimensional, and subject to noise; hardware and biological limitations place restrictive constraints on allowable inputs; direct measurement of system observables is generally limited; and the resulting systems are typically highly underactuated. In this talk, I highlight a collection of recent analysis techniques and control frameworks that have been developed to contend with these difficulties. Particular emphasis is placed on the problem of desynchronization for a population of pathologically synchronized neural oscillators, a problem that is motivated by applications to Parkinson's disease where pathological synchronization is thought to contribute to the associated motor control symptoms.

Biography: Jeff Moehlis received a Ph.D. in Physics from UC Berkeley in 2000, and was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University from 2000-2003. He joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UC Santa Barbara in 2003, and is currently Chair of this department. He was also recently the Chair of the Program in Dynamical Neuroscience at UC Santa Barbara. He has been a recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship in Mathematics and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and was Program Director of the SIAM Activity Group in Dynamical Systems from 2008-2009. Jeff's current research includes applications of dynamical systems and control techniques to neuroscience, cardiac dynamics, and collective behavior. He has published over 100 journal / conference proceedings articles on these and other topics including shear flow turbulence, microelectromechanical systems, energy harvesting, and dynamical systems with symmetry.

Host: AME Department

More Info: https://ame.usc.edu/seminars/

Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/95805178776?pwd=aEtTRnQ2MmJ6UWE4dk9UMG9GdENLQT09

Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102

WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/95805178776?pwd=aEtTRnQ2MmJ6UWE4dk9UMG9GdENLQT09

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Tessa Yao

Event Link: https://ame.usc.edu/seminars/