Tim Gardner

Tim Gardner is a Professor of Biology at Boston University’s College of Arts & Sciences. Professor Gardner studies the mechanisms of temporal sequence perception and production, focusing on vocal learning in songbirds.

The song circuit produces stereotyped structure over a range of time-scales from milliseconds to tens of seconds. Gardner asks how complex songs are assembled from elementary neural units. What are the relationships between patterns of neural activity on different time-scales? Gardner also studies information processing in auditory cortex, examining how auditory signals are transformed as they move from low to high level sensory areas. How are memories for temporal patterns formed?

To address these questions, Gardner works to develop minimally invasive electrodes that provide stable neural recordings in behaving animals. Gardner also develops high-resolution signal processing algorithms for auditory and neural time-series.