Dr. John Miller

Director, Center for Computational Biology
Professor, Dept. of Cell Biology and Neuroscience

Neurophysiology

My recent experimental and theoretical studies have been focused on an analysis of the "codes" with which nerve cells in sensory systems represent information about external stimuli, the neural mechanisms through which that information is processed within subsequent stages of the nervous system, and the extent to which the nervous system may have become optimized through evolution.

My recent experimental and theoretical studies have been focused on an analysis of neural coding in the cricket cercal sensory system. The general problem has been broken down into several distinct questions related to aspects of the observed stimulus/response characteristics of the neurons: 1) What parameters of sensory stimuli are encoded in the spike trains of the receptors and first order sensory interneurons in this system? 2) What is the theoretical limiting accuracy with which those parameters could be decoded from the neuronal spike trains? 3) How is the information encoded within different aspects of the spike train patterns? 4) What are the structural and biophysical mechanisms through which the observed coding scheme is implemented within this neural network?

In collaboration with Dr. Tomas Gedeon in the Department of Mathematical Sciences, I am also studying the extent to which the structure and function of the cricket cercal sensory system may have been optimized, through evolution, to be more efficient from the standpoints of neural computation and sensitivity.

My general approach is to integrate electrophysiological experimental recording techniques with advanced mathematical analysis techniques toward a rigorous characterization of the neural encoding schemes. Electrophysiological approaches techniques include intracellular microelectrode recording and multi-unit extracellular recording. The major analytical techniques I have used include compartmental modeling of single identified nerve cells and a branch of multivariate statistics called "information theory."

Selected Publications

Ogawa H, Cummins GI, Jacobs GA and Miller JP (2006) Visualization of Ensemble Activity Patterns of Mechanosensory Afferents in the Cricket Cercal Sensory System with Calcium Imaging. J. Neurobiol. 66: 293-307.

Aldworth Z, Miller JP, Gedeon T, Cummins GI & Dimitrov AG (2005). Dejittered Spike-conditioned Stimulus Waveforms Yield Improved Estimates of Neuronal Feature Selectivity and Spike-Timing Precision of Sensory Interneurons. J. Neuroscience 25(22): 5323-5332.

Huang Y and Miller JP (2004) Phased array processing for Spike Discrimination. J. Neurophysiol 92: 1944-1957.

Cummins GI, Crook SM, Dimitrov AG, Ganje T, Jacobs GA and Miller JP (2003) Structural and biophysical mechanisms underlying dynamic sensitivity of primary sensory interneurons in the cricket cercal sensory system. Neurocomputing 52: 45-52.

Dimitrov AG, Miller JP, Aldworth Z and Gedeon T (2001) Non-uniform Quantization of Neural Spike Trains through an Information Distortion Measure. Neurocomputing 38-40: 175-181.

Roddey JC, Girish B, Miller JP (2000) Assessing the performance of Neural Encoding Models in the Presence of Noise. J. Computational Neuroscience 8: 95-112.

Clague H, Theunissen FE, Miller JP (1997) The Effects of Adaptation on Neural Coding by Primary Sensory Interneurons in the Cricket cercal system. J. Neurophysiol. 77: 207-220.

Theunissen F, Roddey JC, Stufflebeam S, Clague H, Miller JP (1996) Information Theoretic analysis of dynamical encoding by four primary sensory interneurons in the cricket cercal system. J. Neurophysiol. 75: 1345-1359.

Levin J, Miller JP (1996) Stochastic resonance enhances neural encoding of broadband stimiuli in the cricket cercal sensory system. Nature 380: 165-168.

Landolfa MA, Miller JP (1995) Stimulus/response properties of cricket cercal filiform hair receptors. J. Comp. Physiol. A 177: 749-757.

Education

B.A. in Physics, University of California, Berkeley, 1972.

Ph.D. in Biology, University of Ca., San Diego, 1980. Thesis Topic: Mechanisms Underlying Pattern Generation in the Lobster Stomatogastric Ganglion.

Post-Doctoral Fellowship, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, 1981, Sponsors: Wilfrid Rall and John Rinzel, Research Topic: Computational Neuroscience

Activities

Director, Center for Computational Biology

Member, Advisory Board, The Bradshaw Foundation (http://www.bradshawfoundation.com)

Member, Biology Advisory Committee, Pittsburgh Super Computer Center.

One of 6 founding editors, and current Action Editor, Journal of Computational Neuroscience, Kluwer, 1994-present

Personal web site

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