05.2020 | THE SCIENTIST 49CAREER TITLES AND AWAR DS
Professor, Physiology and Biophysics, University of Washington
Chief, Division of Neuroscience, Washington National Primate Research
Center (2015–present)
Associate Professor of Neurology, Emory University School of Medicine
(2012–2013)
Assistant Professor of Neurology, Emory University School of Medicine
(2005–2012)
McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience Memory and Cognitive
Disorders Award, 2018
National Academy of Sciences Troland Research Award, 2011
Greatest Hits
- Found grid cells were active in the primate brain while a
stationary animal is visually exploring a space - Identified differences in the synchronization of electrical
signals across the layers of cortex within the neural circuit
involved in processing attention - Revealed that visual memory and visual perception are
processed in different regions of the brain
professor, the late Howard Eichenbaum, sparked her interest
in learning and memory. “He would get super excited and
enthusiastic about what he was talking about,” Buffalo says. “I had
these moments through almost every class where I thought, gosh,
the most exciting thing I could ever try to figure out is exactly
what happens in the brain when we learn something.”PHILOSOPHY MEETS NEUROSCIENCE
After completing her undergraduate degree in 1992, Buffalo went to
graduate school with the goal of becoming a philosophy professor.
She enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of California,
San Diego, to work with philosopher Patricia Churchland, wife of the
very Paul Churchland who had authored the book that first piqued
Buffalo’s interest in philosophy. “I was seeking out a philosopher
who really cared about neuroscience,” Buffalo says. “She focused on
philosophy of mind with the idea that, in order to really understand
the mind, what we need to understand is the brain.”
Churchland led Buffalo on an interdisciplinary route,
encouraging her to take classes with the neuroscience PhD
students and to join a lab. Buffalo ended up in the joint lab of
neuroscientists Larry Squire and Stuart Zola, two of Churchland’s
colleagues who studied memory. “It became clear that [Buffalo]
really loved this idea of neuroscience, and that she was bringing
to neuroscience a kind of philosophical framework,” says Zola,
who is now at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center.
“She asked a lot of questions, making us think more about where
we were headed and w hy, and how to interpret findings in ways
that we might not have thought.”
With Squire and Zola, Buffalo worked on identifying
the borders between brain structures involved in memory,
particularly episodic memories of everyday events and those
associated with visual perception. Buffalo recalls wondering:
“Is it just a continuum or is there really kind of this packaging,
where you could say that one area really is involved in memory
and the other area was involved in visual perception?”
By examining the behavior of human patients and monkeys
with brain lesions, Buffalo and her colleagues found evidence
for packaging. Through a series of investigations that involved
going back to data from old experiments, they revealed that
damage to the medial temporal lobe, a region that contains key
memory-related structures such as the hippocampus, impaired
memory, while injury to the adjacent anterior inferotemporal
cortex led to deficits in visual perception but left memory
intact (Behav Neurosci, 112:3–14, 1998).