Balma Serrano defends her PhD thesis!
Balma Serrano successfully defended her thesis in front of a committee formed by Ann Duan (Sainsbury Wellcome Centre), Chris Harvey (Harvard Univ.) and Klaus Wimmer (Centre de Recerca Matemàtica). Balma did a terrific job putting together her large body of work around the study of a task she developed 2020 to investigate parametric working memory in mice. She also pioneered the development of the Training Village, performed pharmacological experiment blocking NMDA receptors both systemically and locally in ALM, carried out optogenetic experiments that aimed to manipulate choice engrams in ALM and performed electrophysiological experiments also in ALM while mice performed the task. If that wasn’t enough, she also combined those experiments with detailed statiscal model and a three attractor network model (carried out in collaboration with Javier Rodríguez). During the discussion, Balma was confronted with many questions going from why she had picked ALM, to the effects of the animal’s velocity during the task, the analysis of the videos or how to obtain more idiosyncratic decision reversals in the computational model "(“lowering the saddels!”). The BCB lab and a good representation of the BARCCSYN community celebrated this important step in Balma’s career with a nice party that featured a new JAMON production. Balma has definitely left a mark in our lab, not just in terms of all the good work she has done, but more importantly at the personal level. Enhorabona Dra Serrano! Well done.
