Rate My Professor Sandra Kuhlman

Sandra Kuhlman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University at Buffalo's Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, a position she assumed in 2023. She maintains an affiliated faculty appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Prior to her arrival at UB, Kuhlman served as Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University from 2018 to 2023. Her academic career has focused on neuroscience, with research interests spanning vision science, learning and memory, brain-computer interfaces, biomedical engineering, circadian rhythm and chronobiology, computational biology, in vivo imaging, neurodevelopmental disorders, neuroscience, schizophrenia, and vision science. Kuhlman's laboratory explores neural processing of sensory information, functional plasticity in the visual cortex, brain activity changes during and after learning, and the stability of feature selectivity in primary visual cortex.

Kuhlman has published extensively on cortical circuits and sensory processing. Key publications include "Response Features of Parvalbumin-Expressing Interneurons in Mouse Visual Cortex" (2010), which detailed the diversity of visual responses in inhibitory neurons; "Top-Down-Mediated Facilitation in the Visual Cortex Is Gated by Subcortical Neuromodulation" (Journal of Neuroscience, 2016); "Feature Selectivity Is Stable in Primary Visual Cortex Across a Large Range of Spatial Frequencies" (2018); "Visual Experience Has Opposing Influences on the Quality of Orientation and Spatial Frequency Tuning" (eLife, 2022); and "Existing Function in Primary Visual Cortex Is Not Perturbed by New Skill Acquisition" (2022). These works highlight how experience shapes visual cortical function without disrupting established sensory representations. At Carnegie Mellon University, she was awarded the Eberly Family Career Development Endowed Chair in Biological Sciences. Currently at UB, Kuhlman teaches Applied Physiology (PGY-412) and mentors PhD students in neuroscience programs, contributing to the training of the next generation of researchers in cellular and molecular neuroscience.