Anthony Zador

Anthony M. Zador is an American neuroscientist and the Alle Davis Harris Professor of Biology and Chair of Neuroscience at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.[1] He is a co-founder, in 2004, of the Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) conference, and of the NAISYS (Neuroscience to Artificially Intelligent Systems) meeting about the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Dr. Zador's research has focused on understanding the circuits of the auditory cortex in rodents. More recently, he has pioneered a new approach to connectome mapping using the methods of molecular biology, which may dramatically decrease the cost and improve the speed of mapping neuronal circuits at the single cell level.[2][3]

Anthony Zador
NationalityAmerican
EducationB.A., University of California, Berkeley; MD-PhD, Yale University
Known forMolecular approaches to connectomics; neural circuits underlying auditory decision making
Scientific career
FieldsNeuroscience
InstitutionsCold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Doctoral advisorChristof Koch
Other academic advisorsCharles F. Stevens

Biography

Anthony Zador received a B.A. at the UC, Berkeley and MD/PhD from Yale University, under the supervision of Tom Brown and Christof Koch at Caltech, focusing on machine learning and computational neuroscience. He carried out postdoctoral research in experimental neuroscience at the Salk Institute with Chuck Stevens before assuming a faculty position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

At CSHL, together with Zachary Mainen, he pioneered the use of quantitative behavioral paradigms in rodents to study perception and cognition.[4] In 2012, Dr. Zador proposed a method harnessing advances in DNA sequencing to map neural circuits with much higher throughput than conventional microscopy-based approaches.[5] This method promises to reconstruct the connectivity matrices of entire brains with single cell resolution. So far, a variant of this approach has been applied to map the projection patterns single locus coeruleus neurons at the mesoscale,[3][6] and also to the visual cortex.

Zador was recognized as a 2015 Foreign Policy Global Thinker.[7] He is also the winner of the Gill Transformative Investigator Award (2018). He is also an occasional columnist for the Observer, writing on the intersection of science, technology and policy.[8]

References
  1. "CSHL Anthony Zador". Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Archived from the original on 20 December 2016. Retrieved 14 December 2016.
  2. "Sequencing the Connectome: Will DNA Bar Codes and a Sneaky Virus Change the Way Scientists Map the Brain?". Scientific American. 23 October 2012. Retrieved 14 December 2016.
  3. "Mapmaking with barcoded neurons". Nature Methods. 31 October 2016. Retrieved 14 December 2016.
  4. "Neuroscience: The rat pack". Nature. 19 May 2010. Retrieved 14 December 2016.
  5. Zador AM, Dubnau J, Oyibo HK, Zhan H, Cao G, Peikon ID (2012). "Sequencing the Connectome". PLOS Biology. 10 (10): e1001411. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001411. PMC 3479097. PMID 23109909.
  6. Kebschull JM, Garcia da Silva P, Reid AP, Peikon ID, Albeanu DF, Zador AM (2016). "High-Throughput Mapping of Single-Neuron Projections by Sequencing of Barcoded RNA". Neuron. 91 (5): 975–87. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2016.07.036. PMC 6640135. PMID 27545715.
  7. "The Year of Changing Our Minds: The Leading Global Thinkers of 2015". Foreign Policy.
  8. "Government's 'Golden Fleece' Is Now Humanity's Golden Goose". The New York Observer. 19 May 2017.
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