Brian S. Blais

Department: Science and Technology

Title: Assistant Professor

Contact Information: bblais@bryant.edu 

Education:

• Ph.D. in Physics, Brown University, 1998
• Sc.M. in Physics, Brown University, 1995
• B.A. in Physics, with honors, Wesleyan University, 1992

Academic Interests: Theoretical neuroscience (learning and memory in neural systems, vision, artificial intelligence); scaling phenomena (statistics of natural images, power laws in evolution and other complex systems, forest fires and percolation).

Teaching:

• Meteorology
• Astronomy and Astronomy Lab
• Physics and Physics Lab

Professional Activities:

• Member of American Association of Physics Teachers. Adjunct Research Professor, Instutute for Brain and Neural Systems, Brown University.
• Center for the Advancement of College Teaching Teaching Certificate, Brown University.
• Blais, B.S., Cooper, L.N., and Shouval, H. (2000) Formation of direction selectivity in natural scene environments. Neural Computation, vol. 12.
• Blais, B.S., Shouval, H., and Cooper, L.N. (1999) The role of presynaptic activity in monocular deprivation: comparison of homosynaptic and heterosynaptic mechanisms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 96:1083-1087.
• Blais, B.S., Intrator, N., Shouval, H., and Cooper, L.N. (1998) Receptive field formation in natural scene environments: comparison of single cell learning rules. Neural Computation 10:1797-1813.
• Lee, A.B, Blais, B.S., Shouval, H., and Cooper, L N. (1999) Statistics of LGN activity determine the segregation of ON/OFF subfields for simple cells in cortex. In The Neurobiology of Computation, Proceedings of the Seventh CNS conference .
• Blais, B.S., Shouval, H., and Cooper, L.N. (1998) Formation of direction selectivity in natural scene environments. Paper presented at Computational Neuroscience Meeting.
• Blais, B.S., Intrator, N., Shouval, H., and Cooper, L.N. (1997) Receptive field formation in natural scene environments: comparison of kurtosis, skewness, and the quadratic form of BCM. In Proceedings of Neural Information Processing Systems.
• Blais, B.S. (1998) The Role of the Environment in Synaptic Plasticity: Towards an Understanding of Learning and Memory. Ph.D. Dissertation, Brown University.

For more information, see Professor Blais's web page.