SHORT BIO
Federico Turkheimer is Reader in Mathematical Neuroscience and is Head of the PET-Methodology Group at the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre at Hammersmith Hospital. His main interest is in the application of mathematics and statistics to problems in neuroscience, particularly in imaging and genomics. He is an electronic engineer by training, holds a PhD in Nuclear Medicine and has worked in PET and neuroscience for the past 18 years holding appointments at the National Institute of Mental Health (Bethesda), at the University of Cambridge and at the MRC Cyclotron Unit on the Hammersmith Campus.

ABSTRACT
Models do not only shape the way we analyze data but also frame the way we make inferences about the systems we observe. In Neurosciences two independent modelling views have alternated in driving the analytics applied to brain data, the locationist and the holist (connective). These established viewes of brain function have exclusively emphasized evidence for either functional segregation or for functional integration among components of the nervous system. Neither of these views alone adequately accounts for the multiple levels at which interactions occur during brain activity. The lecture will illustrate the application of techniques for the study of large scale collective properties that have a long tradition in statistical physics that are shedding light and opening a novel perspective on this old and perplexing conundrum.