Charles F. Stevens

Charles F. Stevens , called Chuck Stevens, (born September 1, 1934 in Chicago ) is an American neurobiologist.

Stevens studied psychology at Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in 1956 and then medicine and received a doctorate in medicine (MD) from Yale University in 1960 . In 1964 he received his PhD in biophysics from Rockefeller University under Keffer Harline. In 1963 he became an assistant professor and later professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Washington Medical School and in 1975 professor of physiology at Yale University Medical School. In 1983 he switched to a professorship for molecular neurobiology and in 1990 he became a professor at the Salk Institute . He was also at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1986 to 2007 and he is an adjunct professor of pharmacology and neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego . He also has an external professorship at the Santa Fe Institute and is a member of the Aspen Center of Physics.

He researched the molecular basis of signal transmission at synapses. Stevens works both experimentally and theoretically. He assumes that the brain represents a scalable architecture of nerve circuits, that is, the path to higher intelligence leads in nature through constant growth of the brain, whose fundamental architecture does not change significantly, but is geared to this growth ( it is scalable ). In doing so, he found that there are some basic cross-species design principles. For example, he found a certain scaling behavior of the number of nerve cells and their size, first in the ganglion cells of the retina of fish. More and smaller pixels mean higher resolution, but also a poorer signal-to-noise ratio, between the two evolution tried to find a balance with a constant ratio. In the course of evolution, the size of the retina or other parts of the brain increased and in a linear relationship (with a coefficient of 2/3) the area (in the case of the retina) or the volume from which individual nerve cells obtain their information (the pixel Size at the retina). Another design principle with scaling property is that the parts of the brain are arranged in such a way that the wiring is minimal (and so more capacity is available for information processing instead of for communication between parts of the brain).

The Nobel Prize winner Erwin Neher was one of his post-doctoral students.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1982) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1984). In 1979 he received the W. Alden Spencer Award and in 1998 he gave the Van Vleck Lecture . In 2011 he received the Pasarow Award .

Fonts

• Neurophysiology, BLV Verlagsgesellschaft 1969

Web links

• Homepage at the Salk Institute
• Interview, Proc. Nat. Acad. Soc. Volume 109, September 2012 (pdf)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Birth and career data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004