This project will investigate the existence and role of synchrony in the firing patterns of neurons presynaptic to the same neuron in biological neural networks. We have noticed such an effect of synchrony in the MICrONS Consortiums mouse visual cortex connectomics dataset, which contains both anatomical and functional data of tens of thousands of neurons. The first phase of the project involves further analysis of the functional data, and accounting for different factors that could affect synchrony, such as distance between neurons and different cell types. The second phase of the project involves modeling the system as an artificial spiking neural network, in order to provide insights on the possible effects of synchrony on the network, such as an increase in efficiency or robustness.

I am participating in SuperUROP because I am excited to combine my interest in neuroscience with my computer science background and apply it to a long-term research project. I am also very excited to generally learn more about the research process, and hopefully get interesting results from my research.