Two months after being born in Boston, I went back home to Santiago, Chile where I lived a beautiful south american life. Little did I know that 23 years later I would be coming back.

I went to Andree English School for low- middle- and high- school education in Santiago. This is a wonderful place to study, so if you are thinking about sending your kids there, don't think twice. Three thumbs up :D. Miss Janine was a wonderful school director and Miss Patricia Santos was THE best teacher/friend/motherly figure we could ask for.

After highschool I decided to study biology in the University of Chile. The initial purpose was to become a human geneticist, so as to be able to perfect the human race (sounds evil). After realizing that I disliked genetics quite a bit, I was lucky enough to discover neuroscience.

I joined the lab of Jorge Mpodozis, former grad student of Humberto Maturana. Mpodozis, together with Gonzalo Marin and Juan Carlos Letelier have been working for some years in the tectum of the pigeon. They have helped to elucidate the most intimate secrets of the workings of the tectum, and very soon they will surprise the world with their new discoveries... stay tuned. In collaboration with Harvey karten at UCSD (my subsequent boss), they discovered the exquisite circuitry of the tecto-rotundal projection.

Unfortunately, on 2006 a fire completely destroyed the lab as well as years of valuable unpublished material, almost finished thesis projects of at least 3 grad students and many many more things. Happily though, no one was hurt and all our memories of that place are intact. With a lot of effort they are reconstructing the lab, but still any equipment or materials would be happily received as donations, so don't doubt about contacting them if you can help.

After finishing my BS, I decided to work for a year as a lab tech. Due to collaborations, Dr Mpodozis put me in contact with Harvey Karten who is the world's most knowledgeable neuroanatomist. Maybe someone will want to debate that, but without any doubt he is the world's authority in avian neuroanatomy. He also has expertise in many other animals such as fish, boats, amphibians and mammals which makes him the ideal soup of knowledge to ferment the outstanding comparative neuroanatomist that he is. He not only has highly respected evolutionary theories about the origin of neocortex based on his extensive studies on the connectivity of brain structures, but also in the last few years, together with his grad student Dan Major and in collaboration with Mpodozis and Marin in Chile, they created an elegant model of motion detection, based on neuroanatomy and neurophysiology findings.

After working for a year in Harvey's lab at UCSD, and learning a looooot about neuroscience and life in general, it was time to depart towards the east cost... I've got to admit, I think I am an east coast kinda guy. Nothing wrong with San Diego, but Boston rules. I started my quest towards getting my PhD in Neurosciences at Harvard Medical School on 2003. Boston is an incredibly nice city, so no regrets for choosing this place to spend 5-6 years. Even though at some points during the winter I wish Boston was in the middle-east.

Here at Harvard I decided to join Margaret Livingstone's lab. It was actually quite easy to decide. Marge is a world renown neurophysiologist and neuroanatomist. She was the student and long-time collaborator of our demigod David Hubel (whose lab is right across the hall). Together they advanced the studies of the basic architecture and physiology of the early visual cortical areas. This is a research project that was lunched by David Hubel when, working with Torsten Weisel, discovered the existence of cells in primary visual cortex of cats that fired vigorously to a bar of light in particular orientations. This discovery (together with their discovery of a critical period for the development of ocular columns) earned them the Nobel prize of Medicine. In Marge's lab the projects range from the characterization of new visual areas, to the neurophysiology of visual perception, color perception, disparity perception, motion perception, human psychophysics, monkey fMRI, and the relationship between vision and art. As you can see, the range of topics is not bad at all.

At Marge's lab I am working on the neural basis of visual perception. Specifically I want to know what it is that needs to happen in our brains in order for us to see something. And I am not talking about the well-too-known light falls into your retina and it is transduced into chemical activity that propagates through the optic nerve to the rest of the brain. What I want to know is what I REALLY need. Unfortunately, I don't think we have an advanced enough conceptual knowledge of perception to be able to tackle this question directly (we don't even have a good definition of what it means to perceive), but that is what makes it fun.

Why do I want to know this? Hmm, good question. Well, even though this is interesting in itself, the final purpose is to understand how the whole brain works as such a well oiled machine. And how can we understand that, if we don't even know how we communicate with the external world? So at some point I also want to know how it is that perception relates to memory storage and decision making.... but I'll leave that for later. Maybe for another life.