Undergraduate student researcher Eunice Yiu successfully defended her honors thesis titled, “The Relationship between Spatial Occupancy Time and Firing Patterns of Hippocampal CA1 Neurons in Response to Changes in the Social Context”. Congratulations on the excellent work Eunice!

Wendy will be starting at Cornell and joining the David Smith lab in the Fall 2020. She is coming from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she was an Undergraduate Research Assistant in the Rhodes Laboratory.

New paper with Gregory Peters is now online in the Behavioral Neuroscience journal.

Peters, G. J., & Smith, D. M. (2020). The medial prefrontal cortex is needed for resolving interference even when there are no changes in task rules and strategies. Behavioral Neuroscience, 134(1), 15-20. https://doi.org/10.1037/bne0000347   

The lab’s more recent research on Hippocampus spatial, episodic, and contextual memory as well as our work on the Retrosplenial Cortex were featured in a Cornell Research Feature article. Read the full article here: Cornell Research – Do I Know You? Where Have We Met?

Adam M.P. Miller, William Mau, and David M. Smith found that spatial representations develop in the retrosplenial cortex (RSC) as rats learn a memory guided spatial navigation task. Spatial information is encoded in the form of population firing patterns, and, after learning, these firing patterns simulate future goal locations, suggesting an RSC role in navigational planning.

Miller, A. M. P., Mau, W., & Smith, D. M. (2019). Retrosplenial cortical representations of space and future goal locations develop with learning. Current Biology, 29(12), 2083-2090.e4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.05.034   

The Stephen H. Weiss Awards were announced November 2, 2018 by President Martha E. Pollack at the Cornell University Board of Trustees meeting. Each year Cornell recognizes eight faculty members for excellence in teaching of undergraduate students and contributions to undergraduate education. David Smith was one of the two Stephen H. Weiss Junior Fellowship Award, which is awarded to associate professors.

To read the full story, please see: Cornell Chronicle – Eight Faculty Honored with Weiss Teaching Awards

Lab undergraduate student researcher Lindsay Rait was featured in an article in the Cornell Chronicle. Lindsay has been meeting weekly in our lab with a high school junior student to share research method knowledge and exposure to scientific research. Lindsay is one of 20 Cornell students who work with high school students as part of a new Young Researchers Program of the Cornell Undergraduate Research Board (CURB).

More information here: Cornell Chronicle – Undergrads Share Lab Know-how with High School Students.