The School of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Many of the most interesting and important neurobiological phenomena, as well as the pathological processes underlying neurological diseases, involve interactions at multiple levels. For example, certain forms of Alzheimer Disease result from mutations in the genes that code for the proteins that process the beta-amyloid peptide, the build-up of which results in the dysfunction and death of neurons, which in turn lead to failure of the neural circuits and brain regions that mediate memory and cognition. Our work concerns the computational modeling of multilevel neurobiological process, with a focus on Alzheimer Disease. By representing experimental findings formally as declarations in a computer program, the pathophysiology of Alzheimer Disease can be explored through simulation and analysis, leading to experimentally testable predictions and new perspectives on possible pharmacological interventions.

Representative Publications

Anastasio, T.J. and Gad, Y.P. (2007) Sparse cerebellar input can morph the dynamics of a model oculomotor neural integrator. Journal of Computational Neuroscience 22:239-254.

Raginsky, M. and Anastasio, T.J. (2008) Cooperation in self-organizing map networks enhances information transmission in the presence of input background activity. Biological Cybernetics 98: 195-211.

Barreiro, A.K., Bronski, J.C. and Anastasio, T.J. (2009) Bifurcation theory explains waveform variability in a congenital eye movement disorder. Journal of Computational Neuroscience 26: 321-329

Rothganger, F. and Anastasio, T.J. (2009) Using input minimization to train a cerebellar model to simulate regulation of smooth pursuit. Biological Cybernetics 101:339-359 DOI 10.1007/s00422-009-0340-7

Anastasio, T.J. (2010) Tutorial on Neural Systems Modeling. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, MA

Complete Publications List