4/11/25 Daniel Felleman, Distinguished Alumni: Visual Cortex: Neurons, Modules, Maps, and Hierarchies
Neuroscience Brown Bag
Daniel Felleman, PhD
Professor of Neurobiology & Anatomy
McGovern Medical School
Date: Friday, April 11, 2025
Time: 1:25-2:15pm
Location: Wilson Hall 316
Visual Cortex: Neurons, Modules, Maps, and Hierarchies
The past forty years has seen a remarkable revelation on our understanding of the organization and function of the cerebral cortex, especially primate visual cortex. This lecture will review my journey as a graduate student in the Kaas laboratory at Vanderbilt University, post-doctoral training in the Van Essen laboratory at Caltech and culminating as a professor in my own laboratory at McGovern Medical School, UTHealth, Houston. In my journey, I experienced many shifts of experimental paradigms including electrophysiological single-unit recording of area MT in owl monkeys at Vanderbilt, combined anatomical and single-unit studies of areas V3 and V4 in macaque monkeys at Caltech, and integrated anatomical, single-unit, multi-electrode array recording and intrinsic optical imaging investigations of areas V2, V4 and inferotemporal cortex in macaques at UTHealth. These investigations, in association with numerous other investigator’s journeys, has led to a new understanding of the role of neurons, modules, maps, and hierarchies in the function of visual cortex.
In this talk, I will review some of the key moments in my journey through visual cortex with the goal of identifying some of the remaining mysteries that underly the role of cortex in visual perception.