Pamela Reinagel
Assistant Professor of Biology, UCSD

e-mail: preinagel@ucsd.edu
Lab Website: Reinagel Lab
Dr. Reinagel's Home page

 We are interested in the neural basis of real-world sensory perception. We combine theory and experiments to study how neurons encode visual scenes for transmission from the retina to the brain, in a relay called the LGN. Perceptual discriminations are normally made within a complex and structured environment. The input to each sensory receptor is constantly changing in time as things in the environment move and change, and as the organism itself moves through the world. Often this complex and changing information must be processed from a single unique experience. Reliable perceptual judgments must be made rapidly to be useful for the control of behavior. Therefore an important general problem for sensory biology is how dynamic sensory stimuli can be reliably encoded by the responses of sensory neurons, in real time and in a single trial. To address this question we are pursuing four general projects in the lab: temporal coding, population coding, natural scenes, and visual behavior.   For more information please see the lab website.

     Denning, K. and Reinagel, P. (2005). Visual Control of Burst Priming in the Anesthetized Lateral Geniculate Nucleus. J. Neurosci. 25(14):3531-3538.

     Reinagel, P. and Reid, R.C. (2002). Precise firing events are conserved across cells. J. Neurosci. 22:6837-6841.

     Keat, J., Reinagel, P., Reid, R.C., and M. Meister. (2001). Modeling precise spike trains from visual neurons. Neuron 30:803-817.

     Kara, P., Reinagel, P. and Reid, R.C. (2000). Low response variability in simultaneously recorded retinal, thalamic, and cortical neurons. Neuron 27: 635-646.

     Reinagel, P. and Reid, R.C. (2000). Temporal coding of visual information in the thalamus. J. Neurosci. 20:5392-5400.

     Reinagel, P. and Zador, A. (1999). Natural scene statistics at the center of gaze. Network: Computation in Neural Systems 10:341-350.

     Reinagel, P., Godwin, D., Sherman, M., and Koch, C. (1999). Encoding of visual information by LGN bursts J. Neurophysiol. 81:2558-2569.

     Warland, D.W., Reinagel, P. and Meister, M. (1997). Decoding visual information from a population of retinal ganglion cells. J. Neurophysiol. 78(5): 2336.

Pam Reinagel received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry at Harvard University. She conducted postdoctoral research in theoretical neuroscience with Christof Koch at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and in experimental neuroscience with R. Clay Reid at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Reinagel is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship. She started her lab at UCSD in 2003.