Rate My Professor Alon Poleg-Polsky

Alon Poleg-Polsky, MD, PhD, serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. He received his MD and PhD in neuroscience from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, completing graduate work under Prof. Jackie Schiller, where he investigated the contribution of dendritic NMDA receptors to the function of cortical pyramidal neurons, demonstrating that dendritic spikes act as independent computational units that enrich information processing and synaptic plasticity. Following this, he pursued postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Jeffrey Diamond at the National Institutes of Health, focusing on network and synaptic mechanisms underlying direction selectivity in retinal circuits.

Poleg-Polsky's research program centers on dendritic integration and visual processing in the retina, utilizing techniques including patch clamp electrophysiology, two-photon microscopy, transcriptomics, in vivo electrophysiology, and computational modeling with NEURON simulations. Current projects explore retinal function changes in disease models such as traumatic brain injury and glaucoma, machine-learning-assisted receptive field mapping via the REVEAL algorithm, spatial distribution of mouse retinal ganglion cells using spatial transcriptomics, and mechanisms of direction selectivity in starburst amacrine cells involving presynaptic inputs and voltage-gated channels. Notable publications include Bacmeister et al., 'Motor learning drives dynamic patterns of intermittent myelination on learning-activated axons,' Nature Neuroscience (2022); Gaynes et al., 'Classical center-surround receptive fields facilitate novel object detection in retinal bipolar cells,' Nature Communications (2022); Otor et al., 'Dynamic compartmental computations in tuft dendrites of layer 5 neurons during motor behavior,' Science (2022); Poleg-Polsky, 'Dendritic spikes expand the range of well-tolerated population noise structures,' Journal of Neuroscience (2019); Poleg-Polsky and Diamond, 'NMDA receptors multiplicatively scale visual signals and enhance directional motion discrimination in retinal ganglion cells,' Neuron (2016); and Poleg-Polsky and Diamond, 'Retinal circuitry balances contrast tuning of excitation and inhibition to enable reliable computation of direction selectivity,' Journal of Neuroscience (2016). His contributions elucidate fundamental principles of neural computation in the visual system.