Dr. Nelson Spruston

Featured Author: Nelson Spruston

Nelson Spruston (b. May 27, 1963 in Vancouver, Canada) received a B.Sc. in Physiology from the University of British Columbia, Canada, in 1985 and his PhD in Neuroscience from the Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, in 1991. After post-doctoral training at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany, he was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Physiology at Northwestern University, Illinois. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2001 and Full Professor in 2006, his current position.

Dr. Spruston has received several distinctions, including an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship, the NARSAD Distinguished Investigator award, the Cajal Club Cortical Explorer Prize (1998) and a National Science Foundation Career award. He is on the editorial board of Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience and The Journal of Physiology.

Dr. Spruston uses a combination of experimental and computational methods to investigate the hippocampus. Specifically, his lab studies several aspects of neural coding in hippocampal pyramidal neurons, with a focus on how synaptic integration occurs in complex dendritic trees, how voltage-gated conductances contribute to synaptic integration, and how these channels contribute to the induction and expression of neural plasticity. He has published over 50 journal articles and book chapters and he edited (with G. Stuart and M. Häusser) the book Dendrites, which is now in its 2nd edition (Oxford University Press:2007). More information.

Scholarpedia articles:

Pyramidal neuron (2009), Scholarpedia, 4(5):6130.