Sean G. Carver's Research Interests
I am interested in developing and testing methods for identifying neural systems, and in applying these methods to understand the mechanisms of neural coding and sensorimotor processing.
By "identifying neural systems", I mean systematically making inferences about the system based on measured outputs of the system (i.e. based on experimental data).
Identifying the human balance, gait, and postural control system
By the fifth decade of life, most people perform significantly worse on clinical measures of balance. For some, such poor performance creates little more than a minor nuisance. But for many others, balance problems can be devastating, even life threatening. For example, the most common reason for admittance to a nursing home is a recent fall. The cost of falls in the elderly is often enormous -- including lengthy hospital stays and significant pain and suffering.
One of the primary challenges to helping fall-prone patients is the heterogeneous nature of their population: no two patients are alike. Many have sensory deficits, of various sorts. Many have motor deficits. Undoubtedly, there are also many stages of central processing that can go airy. It would be useful to have a diagnostic tool to identify what aspects of the balance control system are failing. That way, a therapist could focus the rehabilitation on the unique deficits of the patient, and could monitor the progress of the rehabilitation. I envision a battery of tests and a systematic way of analyzing the data. This process would be an application of system identification. To identify a system means to make inferences about the system based on measured outputs of the system (i.e. the clinical data).
Identifying sensorimotor mechanisms at the cellular and network levels
One of the things that fascinates me most studying nervous systems is that they can be studied on so many different scales. While the emergent phenomena on the different levels differ so strikingly, they all fit together coherently. I am interested in using neurophysiological data to identify sensorimotor systems at the cellular and network levels. These efforts, aside from their independent scientific merit, fit into my broader clinical ambitions in that I expect them to lead to intuition that will help me generate hypotheses that can be tested at higher levels.
Testing and developing methods for identifying neural systems
Because of a lack of an established theory, much of the inferences that neuroscientists make about neural systems, to date, has been ad hoc, especially when models are involved. I am interested in creating tools for making such inferences in systematic ways.
