Alexander Proekt

Alexander Proekt is Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at the University of Pennsylvania where he is a practicing neuroanesthesiologist. While studying medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, he completed a PhD on biophysics of small networks in the lab of Klaude Weiss. He graduated as an anesthesiologist from Weill Cornell Medical College (New York, NY, USA) and completed postdoctoral fellowships with Prof. Donald Pfaff (Rockefeller University) in neuroscience and with Marcello Magnasco (Rockefeller University) in physics. He studies neurophysiological mechanisms that anesthetics use to extinguish consciousness, and processes that allow the brain to recover consciousness after anesthesia. To study these questions, he uses a combination of techniques including invasive recordings of neuronal activity, computational modeling, pharmacology, and optogenetics. His lecture is entitled: “Neuronal inertia: why emergence is more complicated than you thought.” *The* excuse to sleep late?