Associate Professor of Neurology - University of Pennsylvania

E-mail: aguirreg@upenn.edu
Twitter: @gkaguirre

I am an Associate Professor of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania and a cognitive neuroscientist. My clinical and research work concerns the organization of the brain for mental operations, in particular visual ability. Using MRI, a non-invasive tool for measuring brain structure and function, I study how the human visual system is organized in health, and how it is altered in ophthalmologic and neurologic disease. As a clinician, I treat patients with a variety of disturbances of thinking and memory, with my practice informed by recent insights into the organization of the brain for these functions. I study the methodological development and application of imaging techniques. I am the Associate Director of the Center for Neuroscience and Society and a Senior Consultant to the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience, with a focus upon the use and misuse of brain imaging data. I am also the Associate Director of the Neurology Residency program at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

Post-Doctoral Fellow

My current research analyzes changes in structural and functional connectivity in the visual pathway associated with visual deprivation, which in turn allows for a better understanding of neural development and neuroplasticity within the central nervous system. My doctoral dissertation directly compared diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and tract tracing anatomical data in the same animal (ferret, rodent) to test the potential of DTI for non-invasively detecting normal as well as pathological changes in the organization of neuronal connections during development.

Graduate Student - Neuroscience

Email: dakahn@mail.med.upenn.edu

I am a PhD candidate in the Neuroscience Graduate Group of the Mahoney Institute of Neurological Sciences, under the joint mentorship of Bob Schultz (at the Center for Autism Research at CHOP) and Dr. Aguirre. I am broadly interested in perceptual representations and the neural encoding of similarity. My thesis work explores the interplay of these processes in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). I use event related potentials (ERP) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to probe neural representations in ASD and typically-developed populations.

Graduate Student - Psychology

E-mail: mspits@sas.upenn.edu

I am a PhD student in the Department of Psychology working jointly with Geoff Aguirre and David Brainard. I am interested in the processing of melanopsin-mediated signals in the human visual system. I'm an IGERT Complex Scene Perception Trainee.