Zachary Mainen

Principal Investigator

Biography

Born in Rockville, USA, Zachary Mainen was educated at Yale University before receiving his Ph.D. in Neurosciences from the University of California in 1995. Following his Ph.D. Dr Mainen worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Laboratory of Roberto Manilow at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, USA, until 1997 and then moved to the laboratory of Karel Svoboda in the same institution where he stayed until 1999.  He was appointed Assistant Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1999 and then went on to attain the position of Associate Professor, which he occupied from 2004 to 2007. Between 2002 and 2007 Dr Mainen was also an Affiliated Associate Professor of the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Stony Brook University in the USA. He joined the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme in 2007.

Selected Publications

Uchida, N., Kepecs, A., Mainen, Z.F. 2006. Seeing at a glance, smelling in a whiff:
rapid forms of perceptual decision making. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 7: 485–491.

Feierstein, C.E., Quirk, M.C., Uchida, N., Sosulski, D.L., and Mainen, Z.F. 2006.
Spatial goal representations in orbitofrontal cortex. Neuron 51: 495–507. 

Uchida, N., and Mainen, Z.F. 2003. Speed and accuracy of olfactory discrimination in
the rat. Nat. Neurosci. 6: 1224–1229. 

Mainen, Z.F., Malinow, R., and Svoboda, K. 1999. Synaptic calcium transients in single
spines indicate that NMDA receptors are not saturated. Nature 399: 151–155. 

Mainen, Z.F., and Sejnowski, T.J. 1995. Reliability of spike timing in neocortical
neurons. Science 268: 1503–1506.