Tony Zador, MD, PhD

My laboratory uses a combination of physiological, molecular, behavioral and computational approaches to study the neural mechanisms underlying auditory processing, attention and decision making in rodents. Understanding these processes may one day help us understand the neural basis of consciousness, and may also help us develop treatments for cognitive disorders. I am particularly interested in autism.

I have been at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory since 1999, and I am now Professor of Biology and Program Chair in Neuroscience here. My pedigree includes graduate work with Christof Koch (Caltech) and Tom Brown (Yale), and a postdoc with Chuck Stevens (Salk Institute). I have published some papers and helped to organize some events. I am a co-founder of the annual Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) meeting, which now draws over 500 participants.


Recent publications

  • Asari, H. and Zador A.M. (2009) "Long-lasting context dependendence constrains neural encoding models in rodent auditory cortex" J Neurophysiol 102(5): 2638-56.

  • Lima, S., Znamenskiy, P., Hromadka, T. and Zador A.M. (2009) "PINP: A new method of tagging neuronal populations for identification during in vivo electrophysiological recording" PLoS ONE, 4(7): e6099

  • Otazu, G., Tai, L-H., Yang, Y. and Zador A.M. (2009) "Engaging in an auditory task suppresses responses in auditory cortex" Nature Neuroscience, 2(5):646-54

  • Yang, Y., DeWeese, M.R., Otazu, G. and Zador A.M. (2008) "Millisecond-scale differences in neural activity in auditory cortex can drive decisions" Nature Neuroscience, 11: 1262-3.

    click here for full list of publications including PDFs



    Auditory Attention: From Synapses to Behavior

    Research Overview

    My laboratory is interested in how neural circuits underlie normal processing and attention, particularly in the auditory cortex, and how this processing is disrupted in cognitive disorders such as autism. To address these questions, we use a combination of computational, electrophysiological and imaging techniques at the molecular, synaptic, cellular, circuit and behavioral levels.

    Our approach is to combine the tools of molecular biology with computational and systems neuroscience. Although it may seem obvious that one should turn to molecular biology, the surprising fact is that systems (and particularly cognitive) neuroscience tends to be technically very conservative, using techniques developed decades ago. Because my laboratory uses rodents as the model system, we can exploit the full armamentarium of modern cellular and molecular neuroscience techniques.

    Research in the lab is organized around three main questions:

    We use a variety of techniques and preparations, including:

    Zador Lab People