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H. Tad Blair

moattari

Professor
Primary Area: Behavioral Neuroscience
Address: 8570 Pritzker Hall
Phone: (310) 825-1630
Email: blair@psych.ucla.edu

Research and Teaching Interests:

My research combines experimental neurophysiology with computational modeling to investigate basic principles of neural computation in the nervous system. I am particularly interested in how information is encoded by networks of neural oscillators, and in how learning alters neurons and synapses to form memories and modify behavior. My laboratory investigates these questions by recording neural activity from awake, behaving rats during associative and spatial learning tasks. We also perform in-vivo calcium imaging studies to investigate neural population coding in freely behaving rats.

Representative Publications:

  1. Grgurich, R, Blair HT (2020). An uncertainty principle for neural coding: Conjugate representations of position and velocity are mapped onto firing rates and co-firing rates of neural spike trains. Hippocampus, doi: 10.1002/hipo.2319. [PMID: 32065487]
  2. Jayakumar RP, Madhav MS, Savelli F, Blair HT, Cowan NJ, Knierim JJ (2019). Recalibration of path integration in hippocampal place cells. Nature, doi: 10.1038/s41586-019-0939-3. [PMID: 30742074]
  3. Chen Z, Blair HT, Cong J. (2019). LA-NoRMCorre: LSTM-Assisted Non-Rigid Motion Correction on FPGA for Calcium Image Stabilization, 27th ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). Monterrey, CA, Feb 24-26, 2019.
  4. Monaco JD, De Guzman RM, Blair HT, Zhang K (2019). Spatial synchronization codes from coupled rate-phase neurons. PLOS Computational Biology, 15(e1006741):1 – 42. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006741 [PMID: 30682012]
  5. Blair HT, Wu D, Cong J (2014).  Synchronization coding by ring attractors: A theoretical framework for oscillatory neurocomputing. Phil Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 369: 20120526 [PMID: 24366137].
  6. Welday AW, Shlifer IG, Bloom ML, Zhang K, Blair HT (2011). Cosine directional tuning of theta cell burst frequencies: Evidence for spatial coding by oscillatory interference. Journal of Neuroscience, 31:16157-76. [PMID: 22072668].
  7. Johansen JP, Tarpley JW, LeDoux JE, Blair HT (2010). Neural substrates for expectation-modulated fear learning in the amygdala and periaqueductal gray.  Nature Neuroscience 13, 979-986. [PMID: 20601946]
Publications