IISER MOHALI

Abstract: Excitable cells are ubiquitous in our body, from the uterus to the islets of Langerhans, from the heart to the brain. Although these organs have different functions, their working share in common the central role that bio-electrical signals play in initiating and coordinating their activity. In this lecture, we will see how excitable cells harness membrane-bound proteins to set up ionic currents that result in action potentials. These "digital" electrical signals in turn allow fast, robust communication between cells that makes large, multicellular life possible.

About the Speaker: Sitabhra Sinha (https://www.imsc.res.in/~sitabhra/), a Professor of Theoretical Physics and Computational Biology at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Chennai, is widely known for his diverse research interests spanning complex systems, nonlinear dynamics and statistical physics with applications to systems biology, economic & social sciences and computational linguistics He is currently the Dean of the Computational Biology Graduate Program at the IMSc, and has been adjunct faculty of the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore and the Department of Computer Science, IIT Kharagpur. He did his PhD on chaotic neural networks at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata and postdoctoral research, at the interface of Physics & Biology, in the Department of Physics of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore and later in the Division of Cardiology at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York City, USA. He joined the faculty of IMSc in 2002.