Brief Biography
A few vital statistics - My first steps were in humanities (B.A. in French, Wellesley, 1969; M.A. in Romance Languages, Princeton, 1972). I have retained a keen enthusiasm for language and literature from this period, but have not yet incorporated this directly into my scientific work. My graduate studies (Ph.D. 1979, Boston University) were carried out with Deepak Pandya. At that time, the HRP protocol was just starting to work successfully in monkey tissue, and autoradiography was replacing lesion-degeneration techniques. We used both techniques concurrently to reexamine connectional patterns in the early visual cortical areas, with special emphasis on laminar distributions. This led to the identification, on anatomical grounds, of fundamentally different types of cortical connections ("feedforward" and "feedback," Rockland and Pandya, 1979). The further characterization of these and other connectional types remains an area of active research, along with the interactions and functional importance of converging connectional systems. After spending a year with John Allman at Caltech, I joined Jenny Lund in Charleston, SC. In our first experiments, we wanted to establish the existence of an MT area in tree shrew. With this purpose in mind, we injected HRP into area V1, in the hope of finding a cluster of retrogradely filled neurons anterior to V2, in a densely myelinated area. In fact, we were "detoured" by a dramatic pattern of intrinsic connectivity around the injection site in V1. This led to several papers (Rockland and Lund, 1982, 1983), in which we demonstrated that axon collaterals of pyramidal neurons form patchy intrinsic connections about 2-3mm from the parent soma.