Assistant Professor, Neuroscience and the CNBC University of Pittsburgh   Phone: (412) 268-4486 Fax: (412) 268-5060 Email: mas@cnbc.cmu.edu

Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Research Interests

The overall goal of my laboratory is to establish how brain areas interact as circuits. Many individual brain areas are well understood, but none act in isolation to control behavior; rather, each is a node in larger networks, and it is the information coursing through these networks that mediates behavior. We are only beginning to understand how these larger networks function.

My laboratory focuses on one critical, experimentally tractable network: that which mediates our ability to see the world around us. Seeing requires active processes of visual analysis, cognition, and eye movement generation. These processes are coordinated by circuits that are well understood anatomically but not physiologically. The research in my laboratory seeks to discover the signal content and function of each circuit. For example, we recently studied a circuit that reciprocally links the prefrontal cortex and the brainstem. We showed that the prefrontal cortex instructs the brainstem to make specific eye movements, and that the brainstem reports back to the cortex on how well the behavior was performed.

Our current projects examine circuits that link the prefrontal cortex with the cerebellum and basal ganglia. Also, we are planning to study disrupted networks in animal models of disconnection syndromes such as schizophrenia. We hope that our results lead to new treatments for such syndromes, perhaps through the strategic placement of therapeutic agents, stimulation probes, or lesions.

Recent Publications

• Sommer MA, Wurtz RH: Influence of the thalamus on spatial visual processing in frontal cortex. Nature 444: 374-377, 2006.
• Sommer MA, Wurtz RH: What the brain stem tells the frontal cortex. I. Oculomotor signals sent from superior colliculus to frontal eye field via mediodorsal thalamus. J Neurophysiol 91: 1381-1402, 2004.
• Sommer MA, Wurtz RH: What the brain stem tells the frontal cortex. II. Role of the SC-MD-FEF pathway in corollary discharge. J Neurophysiol 91: 1403-1423, 2004.
• Sommer MA: The role of the thalamus in motor control. Curr Opin Neurobiol 13: 663-670, 2003.
• Sommer MA, Wurtz RH: A pathway in primate brain for internal monitoring of movements. Science 296: 1480-1482, 2002.
• Sommer MA, Wurtz RH: Frontal eye field sends delay activity related to movement, memory, and vision to the superior colliculus. J Neurophysiol 85: 1673-1685, 2001.