KEITH HENGEN, ASsociate PROFESSOR, DEPT. OF BIOLOGY @ WASH U IN STL

 

Science keeps me awake at nighT (As do my Children. Ironically, sleep is a problem for me)

I moved to Wash U late in the summer of 2017. Since then, a brilliant lab has grown around me, often in directions I could never have predicted. As a group, we're driven by the opportunity to observe and test complex networks in the brain. We've built a unique set of tools that lets us track hundreds of neurons for months at a time. We're leveraging this to gain new insight into a variety of questions: How does the brain achieve reliable and robust computation?, How does sleep contribute to the computational capacity of the brain?, and, Can studying network dynamics in diseases (such as Alzheimer's) lead to earlier diagnoses and an entirely novel class of solutions? This is only possible with the support of the National Institutes of Health (NINDS & BRAIN Initiative), the BrightFocus Foundation, Cure Alzheimer's Fund, and of course, Washington University in Saint Louis.

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For fun, here are a few of my favorite papers. If you can find a few minutes, I suspect you’ll enjoy them (you made it this far, after all):

  1. “What Might Cognition Be, If Not Computation?”. This 1995 paper by Tim Van Gelder radically and forever changed my understanding of how the brain must work.

  2. “Effects of remote, retroactive intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients with bloodstream infection: randomised controlled trial”. Leonardo Leibovici’s 2001 work clearly demonstrates that prayer offered in 2000 retroactively improved outcomes for patients who had bloodstream infections between 1990-1996.

  3. “Similar network activity from disparate circuit parameters”. Buckle up… Prinz and Marder tidily sweep away any overly-reductionist assumptions I might have.