Mainak Patel joins the Duke University Department of Mathematics as a Visiting Assistant Professor after completing the MD/PhD dual degree program at New York University. Mainak obtained his PhD in computational neuroscience through NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. His primary research interests are mathematical biology, neuroscience, and computational modeling.

Prior to attending NYU, Mainak received a B.S. in neuroscience from the University of Rochester, after which he spent a year conducting neurophysiology experiments in the inferior colliculus of mice under the guidance of Dr. Joseph Walton at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Mainak carried out his graduate work at NYU under the guidance of his mentors David Cai, David McLaughlin, and Aaditya Rangan. His thesis project consisted of developing a mathematical model of the locust antennal lobe network (the first brain area in the insect olfactory pathway) and, through computational analysis of his model, studying the manner in which the antennal lobe transforms odor representations.

Mainak is interested in a variety of questions in neuroscience and mathematical physiology. How does information processing within the locust olfactory system compare to the manner in which other insects encode odor properties? Are these differences meaningful from an evolutionary perspective? Neurons within the auditory system are capable of producing spikes with startling temporal precision; what mechanisms underlie this remarkable sharpening of timing in successive auditory processing centers? Within the gaze control centers of the barn owl, the midbrain tectal circuit aligns auditory and visual maps of space to create a multimodal topographic representation of spatial location; how does this network facilitate the competition of sensory stimuli for the owl's attention?

Mainak will teach Math 108, Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations, in Fall 2011. He is looking forward to interacting with undergraduates, graduate students, and other faculty members in mathematical biology.