Linnea Herzog

Departments/Programs
Neuroscience
Psychology
Volen National Center for Complex Systems

Contact Info
lherzog@brandeis.edu
781-736-3221

Degrees
Wellesley College, B.A. in Neuroscience (2012)

Research interests
I am a joint Ph.D student between the Katz and Jadhav labs, where I study taste coding in the hippocampus, a region of the brain that plays a key role in contextual and spatial learning. The hippocampus contains a population of neurons called place cells, which respond to specific locations in an animal's environment. While a lot of work has been done to characterize place cells in the rodent hippocampus, less is known about how hippocampal neurons encode other meaningful stimuli, such as tastes-- which is surprising, given that one of the key purposes of having a mental map is to find food. My research seeks to determine how hippocampal neurons respond to tastes, how place and tastes responses interact, and how these interactions shape learning and behavior using chronic multielectrode recordings in awake, behaving rats.