Associate Professor
E-Mail: drector@vetmed.wsu.edu
Office Phone: (509) 335-1587
Laboratory Phone: (509) 335-8735
Office: McCoy South, Room S113
Laboratory: McCoy South 109
Kids Judge Results A & B
Kids Judge Results C
Mom's Weekend 2003
2003 SFN Posters
Neuro 430
Oscillatory behavior is apparent in just about everything we can
observe in the Universe. Planets revolve around the Sun and seasons
occur in yearly cycles, moons orbit their planets and planets spin on
their axis in monthly and daily cycles, plants and animals exhibit
different types of behavioral activity in hourly cycles, and every
minute you breath about 15 times and your heart beats about 70 times. In
fact, each and every molecule is vibrating at some frequency depending
on it's temperature. On the other end of the spectrum, electromagnetic
waves of many types oscillate from many billions of cycles per second
down to once per second or slower. Oscillatory behavior is so profound
in biology that everything an organism does and how it is developed is
dependent on some form of oscillatory mechanism. For example, the
vertebrae in your spinal cord are formed by an oscillatory pattern of
chemical factors across space that set up the distance between each
bone. Long before human kind had any concept of electricity, neural
systems used pulse coded modulation to transmit signal strength to other
parts of the body. This is where my research interests begin. Our brain
interprets signal strength from the rate that a particular neuron fires.
Recent discoveries have shown that neural circuits also exhibit
oscillatory activity that encodes more complex information about sensory
stimulation from a collection of different inputs. The principle focus
of work in my laboratory is to understand how the brain could use
complex interactions of these oscillatory patterns to perform high
levels of sensory processing. For example, a harbor seal can follow the
trail of a fish for 100 meters or more only by using hydrodynamic cues
and persistent vortices left behind by its swimming. The harbor seal
uses oscillatory whisking of its whiskers to probe the environment, and
could transpose the oscillatory information sent to its sensory cortex
for high level processing to locate the fish, much in the same way that
we can use the mathematical Fourier transform to extract information
from oscillating systems in the frequency domain. Incorporation of
standing wave theory also provides a mechanism by which long term memory
in the brain could be explained.
The study of complex oscillatory patterns within intact neural tissue
defies most existing techniques in neurobiology. Thus, the second major
aim in my laboratory is to develop new neurophysiological procedures for
imaging the electrical and chemical correlates of activity from large
numbers of cells in the brain simultaneously. Since nerve cells swell
during activation, and change their light scattering properties very
quickly. We are developing high speed electronic systems to make movies
of neural activity non-invasively using light and detecting changes in
the back-scattered light from neural tissue. We are also developing high
density electrode arrays to record the electrical potentials generated
by the brain from 256 or more locations simultaneously. In collaboration
with Dr. James Krueger, we are studying the plasticity of local neural
group within the brain and their oscillatory activity during different
behavioral states such as sleep. This work is generously supported by a
grant from the NIMH, and the Sleep Research Society J. Christian Gillin
Junior Faculty Award for 2002.
Biographical
Information
David M. Rector, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the VCAPP Department WSU,
received his Bachelor's degree in Biology with a strong emphasis on
Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California at
Davis in 1988. He subsequently spent one year developing a complete
pulmonary function testing system for research and diagnostic use in
premature infants at the Stanford University Medical Center. He went on
to work on his doctorate in Neuroscience with Ronald M. Harper at the
University of California at Los Angeles where he developed an
implantable video system for imaging scattered light changes in neural
tissue from freely behaving animals and studied mechanisms behind Sudden
Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). He completed his Ph.D. degree in 1995 with
honors and started a Directors funded postdoctoral fellowship and
eventually became a technical staff member at Los Alamos National
Laboratory where he continued to develop high speed electronic equipment
for imaging scattered light changes from neural tissue.
Selected Publications
Rector, D.M., Gozal, D., Forster, H.V., Ohtake, P.J. and Harper, R.M.
Imaging of the goat ventral medullary surface activity during
sleep-waking states. American Journal of Physiology 267:R1154-R1160,
1994.
Rector, D.M., Poe, G.R., Kristensen, M.P. and Harper, R.M. Imaging the
dorsal hippocampus: Light reflectance relationships to
electroencephalographic patterns during sleep. Brain Research
696:151-160, 1995.
Rector, D.M. Getting started with Xilinx EPLDs - Part 2: Hands-On
Project - Concept and Design. Circuit Cellar INK, 75:38-46, 1996.
Rector, D.M., Rogers, R.F., Schwaber, J.S., Harper, R.M. and George,
J.S., Scattered Light Imaging InVivo Tracks Fast and Slow Processes of
Neurophysiological Activation. NeuroImage, 14, 977-994 (2001).
Rector, D.M. and George, J.S. Continuous Image and Electrophysiological
Recording with Real Time Processing and Control. Methods, 2001
Oct;25(2):151-63.
PubMed Publications (Note: PubMed Search may produce additional
"Rector" authors.)
