Austin E. Soplata

Austin E. Soplata is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Circuits team in the Simulation Neuroscience Division.

At Blue Brain, Austin focuses on expanding prior thalamus modeling to include anatomical detail from the Blue Brain Atlas, a model of the higher-order Posterior Complex nucleus, and a generalized whole-thalamus model, with the goal of simulating thalamocortical behavior during awake sensory processing and sleep.

Previously, Austin worked on biophysical modeling of the thalamo-cortical loop to investigate the generation and interplay of different oscillations that occur under propofol anesthesia and sleep.

Austin holds a Bachelor of Science in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (US). He obtained his PhD in Computational Neuroscience from Boston University (US) with a dissertation titled “A Thalamocortical Theory of Propofol Phase-amplitude Coupling” (advisor: Nancy Kopell).

In his free time, Austin enjoys reading (especially fiction and science fiction), jogging, cooking, and playing videogames.

Publications

Soplata, AE, Adam, EM, Brown, EN, Purdon, PL, and McCarthy, MM, and Kopell, N. Rapid thalamocortical network switching mediated by cortical synchronization underlies propofol-induced EEG signatures: a biophysical model. Journal of Neurophysiology 130 (1): 86–103 (July, 2023). doi:10.1152/jn.00068.2022

Sherfey, J, Soplata, AE, Ardid, S, Roberts, EA, Stanley, DA, Pittman-Polletta, BR, and Kopell, N. DynaSim: A MATLAB Toolbox for Neural Modeling and Simulation. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics 12 (2018). doi:10.3389/fninf.2018.00010

Soplata, AE, McCarthy, MM, Sherfey, J, Lee, S, Purdon, PL, Brown, EN, and Kopell, N. Thalamocortical Control of Propofol Phase-Amplitude Coupling. PLoS Computational Biology 13, no. 12 (December 11, 2017): e1005879. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005879