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Francesco Battaglia
NERF Visiting Scientist
Assistant Professor, University of Amsterdam
M.Sc.: University of Rome, 1994
Ph.D.: International School for Advanced Studies, 1998
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Research Interests:
- Learning and memory systems
- Hippocampal/prefrontal interactions
- Spatial cognition, and memory consolidation
Laboratory web page: http://www.battaglia.nl/ [External website]
As a visiting scientist at NERF, I will work at the development of a platform for directly manipulate the activity of ell assemblies, tightly coupled, information encoding cell groups during activity behavior and sleep, to see whether we can selectively “edit” memories in this way. This entails a novel combination of advanced neural activity monitoring, closed-loop patterned optogenetic stimulations, and computational techniques, developing ways to stimulate brain networks in a activity-driven fashion. If we understand how to manipulate the cell assemblies that support memory, then we could to manipulate memories themselves, e.g. triggering forgetting of a specific memory, or creating a new memory from scratch, by enforcing the appropriate activity configuration.
For this work, we need a combination of expertise ranging from neurobiology and molecular biology, to electronics, physics, and computer science, which we will establish through collaborations with the NERF community and through a new EU collaborative project ('Enlightenment'), which will see NERF as its main home base.
Selected publications:
- Peyrache A, Battaglia FP, Destexhe A (2011) Inhibition recruitment in prefrontal cortex during sleep spindles and gating of hippocampal inputs, PNAS published online doi:10.1073/pnas.1103612108
- Battaglia FP, Pennartz CM (2011) The construction of semantic memory: grammar based representations learned from relational episodic information, Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience 5:36
- Battaglia FP, Benchenane K, Sirota A, Pennartz CM, Wiener SI (2011) The hippocampus: hub of brain network communication for memory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15, 310-18.
- Benchenane K, Tiesinga PH, Battaglia FP (2011) Oscillations in the prefrontal cortex: a gateway to memory and attention Current Opinion in Neurobiology doi:10.1016/j.conb.2011.01.004
- Benchenane K, Peyrache A, Khamassi M, Tierney PL, Gioanni Y, Battaglia FP, Wiener SI (2010) Coherent theta oscillations and reorganization of spike timing in the hippocampal- prefrontal network upon learning. Neuron 66:921-936. (joint senior co-authorship: FPB and Dr. S.I. Wiener).
- Peyrache A, Benchenane K, Khamassi M, Wiener SI, Battaglia FP (2009) Replay of rule-learning related neural patterns in the prefrontal cortex during sleep. Nature Neuroscience 12:919-926.
- McNaughton BL, Battaglia FP, Jensen O, Moser EI and Moser MB (2006) Path-integration and the neural basis of the ‘cognitive map’ Nature Reviews Neuroscience 7 663-678
- Battaglia FP, G.R. Sutherland GR and B.L. McNaughton BL (2004) Hippocampal sharp wave bursts coincide with neocortical "up-state" transitions. Learning and Memory 11 697-704.