People : Principal Investigators

Aaron Gruber received his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Northwestern University in Chicago Illinois, writing his dissertation on computational models of working memory and its modulation by dopamine. He was a visiting scholar at the Gastby Computational Neuroscience Unit at the University College of London working under the guidance of Peter Dayan during the winter of 2003. In 2004, Aaron began a postdoctoral position with Patricio O'Donnell at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where he used multiple electrophysiological techniques to study how dopamine and inhibitory interneurons could shape neural activity in rodent prefrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens, and how these structures synchronize during decision making. Aaron joined the faculty at the University of Lethbridge in 2009.

Gruber, A.J., Hussin, R., and O'Donnell, P. "Dynamic gating in the nucleus accumbens: Behavioral state-dependent synchrony with the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus". PLoS ONE, 4(4):e5062, 2009.

Gruber, A.J. Powell, E., and O'Donnell, P. "Inhibition shapes responses of accumbens spiny neurons to spatiotemporal aspects of bursting cortical activation". J Neurophysiol 101:1876-82, 2009.

Gruber, A.J. and O'Donnell, P. "Bursting activation of prefrontal cortex drives sustained up states in nucleus accumbens spiny neurons in vivo". Synapse 63:173-180, 2009.

Gruber, A.J., Dayan P., Gutkin B.S., and Solla, S.A. "Dopamine modulation in the basal ganglia locks the gate to working memory". J Computational Neuroscience 20(2): 153-166, 2006.

Gruber, A.J., Dayan P., Gutkin B.S., and Solla, S.A. Dopamine modulation in a basal ganglio-cortical network implements saliency-based gating of working memory. NIPS 16: 1271-1278, 2004.

Gruber, A.J., Solla, S.A., Surmeier, D.J., Houk, J.C. Modulation of striatal single units by expected reward: A model of spiny neurons displays dopamine-induced bistability. J Neurophysiology 90: 1095-1114, 2003.

Gruber, A.J., Solla, S.A., Houk, J.C. Dopamine induced bistability enhances signal processing in spiny neurons. NIPS 15: 181-188, 2003.