Meet the Lab
Here in the EyeWire lab, we aim to go a step beyond the NIH initiative: our challenge is to understand not only regional connections in the brain, but the connections between individual neurons. Our first effort involves tracing the connections in the retina by analyzing images acquired using serial electron microscopy at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany. In order to accomplish this, we have formed a diverse team of scientists, software engineers, artists and social networking experts, and have together created EyeWire!
Sebastian Seung
Sebastian Seung is a Korean American multi-disciplinary expert whose research efforts have spanned the fields of neuroscience, physics and bioinformatics. Dr Seung is Professor of Computational Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Department of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studied theoretical physics with David Nelson at Harvard University and completed postdoctoral training with Haim Sompolinsky at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before joining the MIT faculty, he was a member of the Theoretical Physics Department at Bell Laboratories. He has been a Packard Fellow, Sloan Fellow, McKnight Scholar, Howard Hughes investigator, and PopTech Science Fellow. Dr Seung directs the scientific programs of WiredDifferently, an organzation that supports "citizen neuroscience." Its first project is Eye Wire, which mobilizes volunteers to map the retinal connectome. The ultimate goal of WiredDifferently is to test the hypothesis that the uniqueness of a person, from memories to mental disorders, lies in his or her connectome. His research has been communicated to the general public by the TED talk"I am my connectome", book Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, and article "Connectomics: Tracing the Wires of the Brain."
