Dr. Helmut Koester

Office: NMS 4.120

phone: (512) 475-7906

email:

Helmut J. Koester received his Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 1999. He was Postdoctoral fellow at the Max-Planck Institute, Heidelberg, and at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston. In 2003 he joined the faculty of Baylor College of Medicine as an Instructor. He is currently Assistant Professor in Neurobiology in the Center for Learning and Memory.

Research Interests

In every second of our life we receive a huge amount of information. This information is processed by the brain and ultimately determines our behavior. Sometimes even the smallest sensory cues can drastically alter how we react to our environment. The underlying neural networks must thus be able to differentiate between small variations in the input. At the same time neural networks have the ability to rapidly adapt to changes in the environment.

The problem we face when we try to study the mammalian brain is given by the high interconnectivity between neurons. A functionally closed system thus consists of hundreds of thousands of neurons. At the same time nonlinear processes in the smallest subcellular compartments can have a decisive impact on the output of the whole network. We thus face the challenge of having to observe a large number of neurons, and at the same time their small parts of neurons.

The focus of this lab is thus to use existing tools and develop new ones in order to achieve this goal. One of the methods used is two-photon imaging in combination with electrophysiology. This method allows us to image opaque tissue like the mammalian brain. Recently we were able to record from the individual synapses between pairs of neurons.

Using these methods we will examine the contribution of nonlinear dendritic processes to network information processing and to the information transformation within a cascade of networks.