Guillaume Girier will defend his thesis on Friday, September 20th

The defence will take place at Adela Moyua room of the Faculty of Science and Technology of the Leioa Campus

Guillaume Girier, has a Bachelor’s degree in biology, and a Master's degree in Bioinformatics and Modeling from the Sorbonne University in Paris. His background added to the PhD allowed him to establish multidisciplinary projects based on both the mathematical study of dynamical systems, computations, and experiments on electronic and electrophysiological set-ups. Currently, he has a post-doc position in the team "Complex networks and brain dynamics group" (COBRA, BRADY project) in Prague.

Girier works as a PhD student at the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (BCAM) in computational neuroscience within the research group "Mathematical, Computational and Experimental Neuroscience" (MCEN).

His thesis, titled  A mathematical, computational and experimental study of neuronal excitability is under the supervision of Serafim Rodrigues (BCAM & Ikerbasque)

The defence is scheduled for Friday, September 20^th at Adela Moyua room of the Faculty of Science and Technology of the Leioa Campus at 15:00h.

On behalf of all members of BCAM, we would like to wish Guillaume the best of luck in defending his thesis.

Abstract

Neuronal excitability refers to the ability of neurons to generate electrical signals, called action potentials, in response to stimuli. This concept can be studied through different aspects (mathematical, computational and experimental). In this thesis, we will be interested in studying this concept by overlapping, when necessary, these different aspects in order to extract new results, and this through five different projects. In the first project, we will first mathematically study the behavioral transition between integrator neurons (type-I neuron models) and resonator neurons (type-II neuron models) in mathematical models of neurons while retaining the properties that make the model an integrator neuron. In a second project, we will analyze neuronal data obtained from patch-clamp recordings of Granule cells (GC) during their development. During a transient period of maturation, new GCs intrinsic and synaptic properties exhibit distinct from mature GCs,potentially underlying the contribution of neurogenesis to memory encoding. We will produce a model adapted to this behavior. In two related projects, we will focus on obtaining bifurcation diagrams from noisy experiments, with methods inspired by digital continuation, called Control Based Continuation in experiments (CBCE). The idea is apply closed-loop control to an experiment and iteratively bring the control to being noninvasive, which reveals the attractor of the uncontrolled experiment. In the last project, we will analyze calcium imaging data from the olfactory bulb of several mice to which different chemicals were presented. Our main objective was to highlight neural reaction patterns to stimuli, but also to develop a pipeline allowing to compare the activity of different subjects, through odotopic maps.