Professor Randal A. Koene

Randal A. Koene, Ph.D. is Research Assistant Professor, Computational Neurophysiology Laboratory, Boston University and Research Associate, Department of Experimental Neurophysiology, Center for Neurogenomics and Cognitive Research, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
 
Randal actively seeks out research projects that combine elements of systems neuroscience with the study of biophysical processes in developmental neuroscience and neurophysiology, by applying his neuroscience and engineering experience to the problem domains. Integrative projects that involve modeling large-scale neural networks and detailed neuron morphology address his goal to identify significant functions encoded in neural ensembles, and their dependence on the biophysics of specific components. Understanding this dependency, and the ability to extract encoded functions, can advance basic neuroscience and applied neuroscience, such as medical neural prostheses and neural interfaces.
 
He coauthored Consequences of parameter differences in a model of short-term persistent spiking buffers provided by pyramidal cells in entorhinal cortex, Cholinergic deafferentation of the entorhinal cortex in rats impairs encoding of novel but not familiar stimuli in a delayed nonmatch-to-sample task, First-in-first-out item replacement in a model of short-term memory based on persistent spiking, An integrate and fire model of prefrontal cortex neuronal activity during performance of goal-directed decision making, Modeling goal-directed spatial navigation in the rat based on physiological data from the hippocampal formation, and From biophysics to behavior: Catacomb2 and the Design of Biologically Plausible Models for Spatial Navigation. Read the full list of his publications!
 
Randal earned his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands in 1995 with the thesis Extracting Knowledge in terms of Rules from Trained Neural Networks and his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology at McGill University, Montreal, Canada in 2001 with the thesis Functional requirements determine relevant ingredients to model for on-line acquisition of context dependent memory.
 
Watch Scope and Resolution in Neural Prosthetics and Special Concerns for Emulation of a Whole Brain.
 
Visit his site MindUploading.org. This site addresses the specific issues that may arise when neural prostheses are customized to a specific patient, and when large scale neural prostheses lead to whole brain emulation: the emulation of a patient’s complete brain function in a prosthetic substrate. Site content is focused on neuroscience and computational research that is involved in an eventual progression from neural prostheses to the applied science of whole brain emulation.