Daniel Zaldivar
Research Interests
Daniel Zaldivar received his PhD in Systems Neuroscience from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and the University of Tuebingen under Nikos Logothetis. His doctoral work focused at understanding the role of different neuromodulators on shaping the neuro-vascular coupling relationship. Daniel Zaldivar joined the Section on Cognitive Neurophysiology and Imaging to study the intrinsic dynamics and functional role of basal forebrain (BFB). Although certain features of the cholinergic neurons in the BFB have been studied in detail, including their coarse distribution of anatomical projections, their brain-wide functional roles remain poorly characterized, particularly in primates. This gap in knowledge can be ascribed to a lack of experimental techniques allowing for (1) mapping of cell-type specific anatomical projections, and (2) systematically specifying the intrinsic dynamics and spatial distribution of these projections across distributed brain networks.