Adjunct 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
IPN at 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.
Recent Publications
Foust AJ, Rector DM. Optically teasing apart neural swelling and
depolarization. Neuroscience 145(3): 8870899, 2007.
Krueger JM, Rector DM, Churchill L. Sleep and cytokines. Sleep Medicine
Clinics 2(2): 161-169, 2007.
Sable JJ, Rector DM, Gratton G. Optical neurophysiology based on animal
models. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine 26(4): 17-24,
2007.
Schei JL, McCluskey MD, Foust AJ, Yao XC, Rector DM. Action potential
propagation imagined with high temporal resolution near-infrared video
microscopy and polarized light. NeuoImage. 40(3): 1034-1043, 2008.
Churchill L, Rector DM, Yasuda K, Fix C, Rojas MJ, Yasuda T, Krueger
JM. Tumor necrosis factor alpha: activity dependent expression and
promotion of cortical column sleep in rats. Neuroscience 156: 71-80,
2008.
Roy S, Krueger JM, Rector DM, Wan Y. A network model for
activity-dependent sleep regulation. Journal of Theoretical Biology 253:
462-468, 2008.
Yeager JD, Phillips DJ, Rector DM, Bahr DF. Characterization of flexible
ECoG electrode arrays for chronic recording in awake rats. Journal of
Neuroscience Methods 173(2): 279-285, 2008.
Rojas MJ, Navas JA, Greene SA, Rector DM. Discrimination of auditory
stimuli during isoflurane anesthesia. Comparative Medicine 53(5):
454-457, 2008.
Krueger JM, Rector DM, Roy S, Van Dongen HPA, Belenky G, Janksepp J.
Sleep as a fundamental property of neuronal assemblies. Nature Reviews
Neuroscience 9(12): 910-919, 2008.
Topchiy IA, Wood RM, Peterson B, Navas JA, Rojas MJ, Rector DM.
Conditioned lick behavior and evoked responses using whisker twitches in
head restrained rats. Behavioural Brain Research 197(1): 16-23, 2009.
Rector DM, Schei JL, Rojas MJ. Mechanisms underlying state dependent
surface evoked response patterns. Neuroscience 195: 115-126, 2009.
Wininger FA, Schei JL, Rector DM. Complete optical neurophysiology:
toward optical stimulation and recording of neural tissue. Applied
Optics 48(10): D218-24, 2009.
Schei JL, Foust AJ, Rojas MJ, Navas JA, Rector DM. State dependent
auditory evoked hemodynamic responses recorded optically with indwelling
photodiodes. Applied Optics 48(10): D121-129, 2009.
Rector DM, Schei JL, Van Dongen HPA, Belenky G, Krueger JM.
Physiological markers of local sleep. European Journal of Neuroscience
29(9): 1771-1778, 2009.
Walker JL, Walker BM, Monjaraz Fuentes F, Rector DM. Rat psychomotor
vigilance task with fast response times using a conditioned lick
behavior. Behavioural Brain Research 216: 229-237, 2011.
Phillips DJ, Schei JL, Meighan PS, Rector DM. Cortical evoked responses
associated with arousal from sleep. Sleep 34(1): 65-72, 2011.
PubMed Publications (Note: PubMed Search may produce additional
"Rector" authors.)
