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March 6, 2018

Yale’s Gal Mishne to Present Emerging Scholars Lecture

The Department of Mathematics will host Gal Mishne, Gibbs Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics at Yale University, to present a special lecture Thursday, March 15, as part of the Emerging Scholars in Arts & Science Lecture Series. Mishne will speak at 4:00 pm in Kissam C210 on Local Geometry of Neuronal Activity in Mice.

The Emerging Scholars in Arts & Science Series, co-sponsored by the College of Arts & Science and the Office of the Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence, is intended to spark new conversations within the Vanderbilt community through guest presentations by early-career scholars from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds whose innovative research promises to make significant and lasting contributions to their fields of study. The series features three speakers each year: one each from the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. The speakers are selected by departments in each of those fields.

The Department of Mathematics selected Mishne based on her work in several areas of applied mathematics, including computational neuroscience. Her Emerging Scholars lecture will present some of her latest research in that area.

Experimental advances in neuroscience enable the acquisition of increasingly large-scale, high-dimensional and high-resolution neuronal and behavioral datasets, Mishne says in the abstract of the lecture, yet addressing the full spatiotemporal complexity of these datasets poses significant challenges for data analysis and modeling. I will present a new geometric analysis framework and demonstrate its application to the analysis of calcium imaging from the primary motor cortex in a learning mammal. (The full abstract is available here.)

In addition to computational neuroscience, Mishne’s research interests include manifold learning, diffusion geometry, computational neuroscience, image processing and biomedical signal processing, and applied harmonic analysis. She received her Ph.D. at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. She’s part of the Yale research group on high-dimensional data analysis and also coordinates the applied mathematics seminar there.

A reception will follow the lecture.