About the Centre

The Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of Waterloo was officially approved by the University Senate in October, 2006. It currently consists of ten core and affiliate faculty, who span the departments of Biology, Applied Mathematics, Psychology, Engineering, Philosophy, Computer Science and Statistics. The Centre is currently expanding, running searches for additional core faculty. The distinguished faculty of the Centre include two Canada Research Chairs and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In addition, the Centre has a number of student researchers, both graduate and undergraduate, and hosts postdocs and visiting researchers.

Research at the Centre spans the discipline of theoretical neuroscience (aka computational neuroscience). As such, faculty at the Centre pursue work on purely theoretical questions regarding the foundational principles guiding the function of neural systems, as well as constructing detailed neurobiological models of specific brain areas. The lab descriptions contain more detailed information on the research focus of each faculty member.

The Centre also hosts a graduate program for students wishing to obtain an officially recognized specialization in theoretical neuroscience.

Resources

Members of the Centre have access to a number of research-related resources:

• The list of upcoming and recent past events provides information on the Centre's workshops, colloquia, etc.
• Centre members have access to state-of-the-art computing facilities both locally and as part of Sharcnet, a world-class high performance computing (HPC) network that spans 16 leading research institutions in south central Ontario.
• Experimental facilities used by faculty include functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), clinical neuropsychology, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), event-related potential (ERP), kinematics, histology epidemiology, single cell physiology (whole cell patch clamp, single channel, sharp electrode, etc.), molecular biology (mutagenized ion channels, heterologous expression of channel subunits, molecular modelling, etc.), among others.
• Dedicated research space and collaboration/conference area.