Mark Reimers
Contact
517-884-9532
reimersm@msu.edu
View publications on MSU Scholars
IQ DIVISION – Neuroengineering
Departmental AFFILIATIONS
About
Mark Reimers is an associate professor in the neuroscience program where he integrates statistical analysis with biological theory while analyzing and interpreting the very large data sets now being generated in neuroscience, especially from the high-throughput technologies developed by the BRAIN initiative.
He graduated from the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia and previously held appointments at Virginia Commonwealth University.
The Reimers Lab
The Reimers Lab focuses on the analysis of new technologies such as measuring brain activity by light and motion capture. Our research also analyzes large gene expression and regulation datasets to understand mental illness. We specialize in devising techniques for extracting the most information from optical data and in interpreting these data to understand brain dynamics in relation to behavior.
Four major big data/computational areas:
- Analysis of high throughput brain activity recordings, mostly from optical imaging.
- Gene expression and genetic data related to psychiatric disorders.
- Analysis of patterns in the fine structure of animal motions.
- Simulations of brain activity in behaving animals.
This is a time of revolution in neuroscience. For the past 50 years, it has been impossible to obtain data from more than a few cells in the brain at the speed of brain operations (~10ms). New activity measurement techniques, particularly optical imaging, are now flooding a parched field with data from thousands of neurons, at sub-second time resolution. In principle, these methods could be a hundred times faster and a million times more specific than functional MRI.