Gideon Rothschild, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery
Training Grant Mentor

Biography

Dr. Gideon Rothschild received his B.Sc. in computer science and computational biology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he also earned his Ph.D. in neuroscience in 2012. He did his postdoctoral work with Loren Frank at the University of California, San Francisco, studying how the auditory cortex, hippocampus and prefrontal cortex interact during memory consolidation and retrieval. 

Areas of Interest

Sensation and memory are tightly linked in our everyday lives. Meaningful sensory experiences can transform to become long-term memories, and memories of past experiences influence how we process and perceive incoming sensory input. This bidirectional interaction between sensation and memory is a key process in healthy everyday life, and its failure is found in conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), dementia, and schizophrenia. The Rothschild lab aims to understand the neural circuit mechanisms that underlie the bidirectional interaction between sensation and memory in health and disease. 

To pursue these questions, our core experimental approach is to record and manipulate neural activity simultaneously from multiple brain regions involved in both sensory coding and memory processes, while rodents perform sensory- and memory- guided tasks. A brain region of special interest in the lab is the auditory cortex, which is strongly involved in processing of sounds. By monitoring neural activity in the auditory cortex as the animal is engaged in task performance and during subsequent sleep, we can tap into the sensory neural representation that salient sounds leave during and following experience. To track how some of these sensory representations subsequently assimilate into long-term memories, we simultaneously record neural activity in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is critical for forming new episodic memories, and exhibits reactivation of neural activity patterns of past experiences, a phenomenon believed to support memory consolidation. By simultaneously monitoring and manipulating neural activity in the auditory cortex and hippocampus across learning, our lab aims to understand how information processing within each of these brain regions, as well as communication between them, underlies diverse cognitive phenomena linking sensation and memory.

Published Articles or Reviews

Rothschild G., Eban E. and Frank L. A cortical-hippocampal-cortical loop of information processing during memory consolidation. Nature Neuroscience(2017) 20:251-259

Eban-Rothschild, A., Rothschild, G., Giardino W.J., Jones, R.J. and de Lecea L. VTA dopaminergic neurons regulate ethologically relevant sleep-wake behaviors. Nature Neuroscience (2016) 19:1356-1366

Jadhav S.*Rothschild G. *, Roumis D. and Frank L. Coordinated Excitation and Inhibition of Prefrontal Ensembles during Awake Hippocampal Sharp-Wave Ripple Events. Neuron (2016) 90(1):113-27 (* co-first author)

Rothschild G., Mizrahi A. Global Order and Local Disorder in Brain Maps. Annual Reviews of Neuroscience (2015) 38:247-68

Rothschild G., Cohen L., Mizrahi A., Nelken I. Elevated correlations in neuronal ensembles of mouse auditory cortex following parturition. Journal of Neuroscience (2013) 33: 12851-61

Eban E., RothschildG., Mizrahi A., Nelken I., Elidan G. Dynamic copula networks for modeling real-valued time series. Proceedings of Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) (2013)

Cohen L., Rothschild G., Mizrahi A. Multisensory integration of natural odors and sounds in the auditory cortex. Neuron (2011) 72: 357-369

Rothschild G., Nelken I., Mizrahi A. Functional organization and population dynamics in the mouse primary auditory cortex. Nature Neuroscience (2010) 13(3): 353-60. | News and Views | Cover Illustration