Curriculum Vitae

333 Bryan Research Building
Duke University
Durham, NC 27710
Phone: 919-668-6107
Fax: 919-668-0734

Education

University of California, San Diego (La Jolla, CA)
Ph.D.: Neuroscience September 2004
Thesis Title: How the Leech and its Nervous System Discriminate Touch Location
Areas of Specialization: Sensory coding, behavioral neuroscience
Advisor: William B. Kristan

M.A.: Philosophy March 2004 (Work completed Fall 1999)
Thesis Title: Concepts in People and Artificial Neural Networks
Areas of Specialization: Philosophy of mind, philosophy of science
Advisors: Patricia S. Churchland and Paul Churchland

University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH)
Summa Cum Laude (Overall GPA 3.8)
June 1996 B.S. in Interdisciplinary Math Physics
June 1994 B.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
June 1994 B.A. in Philosophy

Research Experience

Fall 2004-Present: Duke University Postdoctoral Fellow (Durham, NC)
Topic: Population coding in the rat vibrissae system.
Methods: Acquisition and analysis of recordings from multielectrode arrays in awake freely-moving rats.
Advisor: Miguel Nicolelis

Spring 2000-Summer 2004: University of California, San Diego.
Topic: Touch location discrimination in the leech and its CNS.
Methods: Intracellular and extracellular recording and stimulation from pairs of neurons in the leech; multiple-site electromyography (EMG) ; image processing; extensive coding in Matlab.
Advisor: William B. Kristan

Fall 1999-Winter 2000: Salk Institute (La Jolla, CA)
Topic: Analysis of motion coding in primate retinal ganglion cells.
Methods: Sorting retinal ganglion cell spikes recorded from a multielectrode array; application of pattern classification algorithms to neural data; extensive coding in LISP.
Advisor: E.J. Chichilnisky

Summer 1999: University of California, San Diego
Topic: Influence of prefrontal cortex damage on human perception of social interactions.
Methods: Interviewing and scoring questionnaires for neuropsychological subjects and normal controls.
Advisor: V.S. Ramachandran

Fall 1995-Spring 1996: University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH).
Topic: Using telemetry to track lobster locomotion in the Atlantic Ocean.
Methods: Wrote code (in C) for the lab to transfer data between different programs.
Advisor: Winsor Watson

Summer 1993: University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH).
Topic: Molecular systematics of Atlantic Tomcod (G. morhua) populations.
Methods: PCR, Sanger sequencing, phylogeny construction.
Advisor: Thomas D. Kocher

Publications

Thomson E.E. and Kristan W.B. (2006) Encoding and Decoding Touch Location in the Leech CNS. J. Neurosci. 26: 8009-8016.

Thomson E.E. and Kristan W.B. (2005) Quantifying stimulus discriminability: A comparison of information theory and ideal observer analysis. Neural Computation 17: 741-778,

Baca S.M.*, Thomson E.E.*, and Kristan W.B. (2005) Location and intensity discrimination in the leech local bend response quantified using optic flow and principal components analysis. J. Neurophys. 93: 3560-72. (*Authors contributed equally; names were listed alphabetically.)

Teaching Experience

University of California, San Diego (La Jolla, CA)
Spring 2001: Computational Neuroscience teaching assistant for Terrance Sejnowski.
Fall 2000-Winter 2001: Calculus I-Calculus III teaching assistant.
Fall 1997- Spring 1999: Humanities (Ancient Greece through the Middle Ages) teaching assistant.
Spring 1997: Inductive Logic teaching assistant.
Winter 1997: Deductive Logic teaching assistant.

Awards and Fellowships

University of California, San Diego (La Jolla, CA)
2001-2002: Merck Pharmaceuticals Research Fellow
2000: Systems and Integrative Neurosciences (SAIN) Training Grant

University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH).
1996: Phi Beta Kappa
1993: Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship to study molecular systematics