Frequency preference and reliability of signal integration : the role of intrinsic conductances

ii Acknowledgments Many people have influenced my thinking during my PhD, the more so, because the work was done in two different places, Foremost, I would like to warmly thank my advisor Andreas Herz for his continuous support and encouragement, as well as the the opportunity to combine the work in his group with an extended experience abroad. I am grateful that he was always open to my research interests and I have truly enjoyed the exciting research environment that he created at the institute. I am also greatly indebted to Terry Sejnowski at the Salk Institute. He let me join his group and provided an inspiring research environment, where I could profit from the rich scientific life and the expertise in temporal coding in particular. The value of a theoretical work multiplies, if the results can be confirmed in experiments. It has been a pleasure to work with Irina Erchova at the ITB and Jean-Marc Fellous at The Salk Institute. They performed the experimental work presented in this thesis, but also discussed many other aspects of the thesis with me. I am extremely happy that I was given the chance to work with Inés Samengo (ITB) and Paul Tiesinga (The Salk Institute), with whom I had many stimulating discussions about the theoretical part of this work. With Inés, in particular, I enjoyed a lively scientific exchange in a warm and personal working atmosphere. Tim Gollisch did not only contribute to this atmosphere, but he also proved a steady source of knowledge, from which I benefited many times. I have been inspired by many other people at the ITB and I would especially like to thank Stemmler who always had time for my questions and interesting discussions. Jan Benda and Uwe Heinemann provided fruitful feedback on the subthreshold resonance project. Of the people at the Salk Institute, I will gladly remember Tom Albright and Margaret Mitchell (the good spirit of the Sloan center), who supported me throughout my stay, as well as Jutta Kretzberg, Martina Wicklein, Rachel Kalmar, and Alex Koulakov with whom I shared many scientific discussions and many happy hours. I am also grateful to Arthur Houweling who helped me with the programming in NEURON and who shared his views on spike timing reliability with me. I have enjoyed working with two students, Wiebke Krambeck (ITB) and Diane Whitmer (The Salk Institute), whose projects have inspired my work. …