Prof. Sonja Grün (INM-6, INM-10 & IAS-6; Jülich Research Center), together with colleagues Profs. A. Aertsen, P.E. Maldonado and G. Palm, recently published the book “Introducing Computation to Neuroscience – Selected Papers of George Gerstein”.
George Gerstein had his roots in physics and was known for his long-term commitment to transforming neuroscience into a field of more rigorous science, like physics was at the time. With this, he was miles ahead of the field, consistently striving for quantitative analyses, mechanistic models, and conceptual clarity. Eventually, he pioneered what we now know as Computational Neuroscience - many years before the term was coined. But the overarching goal of George Gerstein’s research was always to understand the functional organization of neuronal networks in the brain.
Prof. Grün and the editors now have compiled a selection of George Gerstein’s many seminal experimental, theoretical and computational contributions to neuroscience into a single, comprehensive volume. They also provide a fresh view on the subjects of his work, as several of George Gerstein’s former students and collaborators kindly contributed introductions to various chapters. This does not only frame the papers in their historical and present context, it also adds the personal touch of their involvement in generating the papers and gives a glimpse into lab life. The book itself is organized into a series of chapters with different subjects, each one containing reprints of George Gerstein’s papers in chronological order. Thereby, each of these chapters traces the development of George Gerstein’s seminal contributions to the Neurosciences, be it in the domain of neuron and network modeling or in the area of neuronal data analysis techniques.
In the words of the editors: "We hope that, taken together, these various Chapters and their Introductions will help the reader appreciate how much our current thinking on brain function owes to George Gerstein’s research and the insights gained from it. George was not only an innovative thinker in theory, experiment and analysis methodology, he also inspired by his mode of thinking science. Thus, in a way, this book is both a product of this inspiration and a tribute to it."
-- Dr. David Goyer Scientific Coordinator Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-6) Computational and Systems Neuroscience & Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS-6) Theoretical Neuroscience Jülich Research Centre and JARA Jülich Germany phone: +49-1756402993