Ivan Skelin, MD, PhD

iskelin@uci.edu

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My research interests are focused on understanding the ‘lifetime’ of memories in the brain, from the initial encoding, throughout the consolidation process. What mechanisms are involved in the selection of memory aspects to be remembered, what drives the dynamics of bidirectional information transfer between the hippocampus and cortex, how is the transferred information encoded and decoded, how the new memories get incorporated into the existing schema and what is the neural implementation of the extraction of semantic from episodic memories? How the spectrum of lifetime experiences affects the connectivity matrix, representational capacity and state space of neuronal networks?  To this end, I use the combination of lesion techniques, environmental enrichment procedures and high density single neuron and local field potential recordings from the hippocampus and cortical structures.

 

Ivan

Figure: LFP (top left) and single neuron (bottom left) recordings from the dorsal CA1 of the rat occurring during slow wave sleep, showing the sharp wave ripples.
Top right: Averaged LFP traces filtered in ripple range, recorded from the ventral (pink) and dorsal (blue) CA1 in rat, centered at the peak of the ventral hippocampal sharp wave ripples.
Bottom right: Averaged envelopes of Hilbert-transformed LFP signals (300-900 Hz) from medial prefrontal cortex (red), retrosplenial cortex (green), ventral (pink) and dorsal (blue) hippocampus, centered at the ventral hippocampal ripple peak amplitude.