Bagrat Amirikian, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of Neuroscience

E-MAIL: [email protected]

Research Interests:

Intrinsic cortical circuitry—the pattern of synaptic connections between morphologically distinct neurons within a local cortical region—is essentially unknown, although its structure is crucial for understanding of how neuronal functional modules such as cortical columns are formed, and it ultimately determines what specific cortical processing is performed by the underlying region. My current research interests are focused on two related issues: (i) deciphering the local cortical circuitry from the spatial structure of axonal and dendritic arbors of pre- and post-synaptic cell-pairs and their distribution across cortical layers, and (ii) understanding how these local circuits give rise to functional modules, and how they shape the underlying cortical dynamics.

We investigate these problems using analytical and computational approaches, particularly, very large-scale cortical network simulations on massively parallel supercomputers.

Selected Publications:

(For a comprehensive list of recent publications, refer to PubMed, a service provided by the National Library of Medicine.)

  • Zick JL, Blackman RK, Crowe DA, Amirikian B, DeNicola AL, Netoff TI, Chafee MV. Blocking NMDAR disrupts spike timing and decouples monkey prefrontal circuits: implications for activity-dependent disconnection in Schizophrenia. Neuron. 2018 Jun 27;98(6):1243-1255.
  • Christopoulos VN, Boeff DV, Evans CD, Crowe DA, Amirikian B, Georgopoulos A, Georgopoulos AP. A network analysis of developing brain cultures. J Neural Eng. 2012;9(4):046008.
  • Georgopoulos AP, Merchant H, Naselaris T, Amirikian B. Mapping of the preferred direction in the motor cortex. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 Jun 26;104(26):11068-72.
Picture of Bagrat Amirikian