Aaron M Lambert

About me:

I'm an alacritous lover of knowledge and a staunch scientific humanist and agnostic. My time is largely devoted to working on a Ph.D. in Neuroscience at The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. My work in the Masino Lab is focused on elucidating central pattern generators and the functional organization of spinal locomotor circuitry. I'm originally from Chicago and last worked as a Research Technologist in the Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Biological Chemistry at Northwestern University, where our lab investigated how the hormone melatonin regulates and is regulated by the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which is the brain's master clock. Before this, I was with the Chair of Neurobiology at The University of Chicago performing experiments that were crucial for the completion of a pending scientific paper. It's published in the Journal of Neurophysiology and delineates how we found circuits in nucleus raphe magnus of the rat brainstem that allow the animal to contiguously react to visceral pain EVEN in the presence of concurrent cutaneous nociception. As for my academic background, I graduated from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a Bachelor of Science in Biological Psychology. My undergraduate focus was in sensory systems, namely mammalian vision and audition. To this aim, I was a research assistant in a lab that studied speech perception through electrophysiological experiments in chinchillas. My project involved quantitatively comparing the neural encoding of different versions of speech (i.e. in terms of their spectral detail) at the auditory nerve, which receives the cochlea's output and innervates the brainstem. It turns out that highly spectrally reduced speech is still intelligible to the listener, and people with cochlear implants are walking proof of this. These people, who were once completely deaf, can understand "noisy" speech stimuli via temporal cues of the original waveform's amplitude. I exuberantly encourage you to Go Here To Hear what this phenomenon actually sounds like. I now digress from the esoteric research realm to give other info about myself, as to not bore some readers ad nauseam. My friends and I used to be into skating, but that's an archaic historical artifact. I'm a true lover of music, owning over 4000 albums spanning an extremely eclectic range of genres. I've been playing guitar for over 10 years, but my only experience on stage was as a vocalist in a band called Stillife. The members of the band were all my close friends (and still are) and they have since formed two separate bands, Bearclaw and Darkmoor, the former of which is still thriving today in Chicago. As for my current daily activities and hobbies, I've been running virtually every morning along "The Greenway", lifting regularly, drinking good coffee, engaging in scintillating conversation, reading the "Bible of Neural Science", working like a mad scientist, enjoying life in the Twin Cities and attempting to selectively and advantageously collapse the quantum fields giving rise to my ongoing reality. I have been a 100% non-smoker for over 3 years and have not had the slightest desire to ever go back. In short, every day I've been focusing on transcending the person I was the day before. I'm sure I'll take many steps backwards along the way. I always do. Those back steps are negligible, however, in comparison to the net improvement I've made in myself as a human being over all of my years, and it's starting to become a lot of years. Well, now that I sound like some enlightened philosophe , I'm going to take this "About Me" section to bed. This is where I'm at in my life right now, and I think I've made it clear what I am passionate about: science and music. If you share a similar passion, we could get along. If you don't, we still might be able to get along, but probably not with the same intensity. Of course, most people I talk to on myspace I already knew before... in "REAL" life. Our relationships are what they are. This disclaimer is for those of you deranged enough to want to superficially meet me via the wonderful and now essentially defunct myspace network. Find me on Facebook if you find the Myspace interface too desolate.

2008-PRESENT Masino Lab 2006-2008 Dubocovich Lab 2005-2006 Mason Lab 2004-2005 Wickesberg Lab