Stephen G. Lisberger, Ph.D.

 

Administrative Accomplishments

I have held administrative leadership positions continuously since 1990. At UCSF, I was the founding Director of the W.M. Keck Foundation Center for Integrative Neuroscience and the co-Director of the Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology. At Duke, I am the Chair of the Department of Neurobiology, I was the “Convener” of the neuroscience pillar of a project called “Translating Duke Health”, and I played a major administrative leadership role in the renaissance of our Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. My service has taught me to the need to find the “right” solution for all parties, enlightened me about the importance of deep engagement with all important issues, and enriched my abilities to develop process, create consensus, and get stuff done. It also taught me how to manage difficult situations and to lead by example.

Degree, Institute, Year Earned

Research Areas

I am a systems neuroscientist who studies simple forms of movement in the complex brain of awake, behaving rhesus monkeys. I am interested in how we learn simple motor skills and how we use what we see to guide our movements. I have studied the sensory cortex, the motor cortex, the cerebellum, and the brainstem with single-unit recording methods. I exploit quantitative analysis of behavior and neural responses along with computational and theoretical analyses to understand how brain-wide neural circuits guide and learn behavior. 

Current Position(s) at Your Current Institution

• Professor and Chair, Department of Neurobiology

Memberships

Service Positions

Editorial Boards:

Other Service Positions:

Science Biography

Steve Lisberger is a systems neuroscientist recognized for his research on how the brain learns simple motor skills and how it uses visual inputs to guide movement. His lab exploits a relatively simple form of movement, namely eye movement, in the complex brain of macaque monkeys to investigate general principles of how the brain works and learns, while it is actually working and learning. He has leveraged a wide-ranging toolkit, including behavioral analysis, neural recordings, and theory and computation. Lisberger’s laboratory has delivered a complete and coherent story of how plasticity in the cerebellum leads to behavioral learning. They provided two complete accounts for two different movements: the vestibulo-ocular reflex and smooth pursuit eye movements, showing that primary learning is in the cerebellar cortex guided by the unique inputs from climbing fibers, while consolidation occurs in the cerebellar nucleus, guided by the output from the cerebellar cortex. They continue to ask how the full cerebellar micro-circuit transforms its inputs into outputs to learn and guide movement. In a second research area, Lisberger’s lab studies how a sensory-motor behavior works, from cortical sensory neurons all the way to motoneurons. They have: (i) described the central representation in extrastriate area MT of the visual motion that drives smooth eye movements; (ii) revealed how the brain decodes target speed and acceleration from the sensory representation; (iii) identified a mechanism in the frontal eye fields that allows the brain to calculate motion reliability and use it to modulate the strength of visual-motor transmission; and (iv) explained how the cerebellum combines sensory and motor signals to coordinate the final motor output.  Lisberger has been a tenured faculty member at UCSF and Duke, was an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for 17 years, and has served in many academic and administrative leadership roles.  He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the US National Academy of Sciences.

The full CV for this candidate can be found within the ballot.