Frank Moss, the Curator’s Professor and Director of the Center for Neurodynamics at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, will present a lecture,Stochastic Resonance: From the Crayfish to Whole Animal and Human Behavior,at 4 p.m. Thursday, April 22, in Room 260 Hodges Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Dr. Moss will be on campus as part of the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences’Distinguished Visitors Program. Kenneth Showalter, the C. Eugene Bennett Chair of Chemistry, is organizing the lecture.
Moss holds degrees in both physics (Ph.D.) and engineering (B.S. and M.S.) from the University of Virginia. Before joining the faculty of the University of Missouri at St. Louis, he studied macroscopic quantum fluids at the University of Rome in Italy on a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.
His early research centered on turbulence in superfluid liquid helium, for which he was later awarded a fellowship by the American Physical Society. He then studied random fluctuations and noise in nonlinear physical systems, and in the early 1990s broadened these studies to include applications in sensory biology.
Together with Lon Wilkens of the Biology Department at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, he established the Center for Neurodynamics in 1995, and continues to serve as director. Research from the center has attracted editorial commentary in numerous science journals, such as Nature, Science and Science News, as well as in the popular press, including The Economist and The Financial Times (London).
Moss is the author of over 200 scientific publications and the editor of several books and special issues of journals. He was awarded senior fellowships by the British government, by NATO and by the Humboldt Foundation in Germany. He currently serves on the editorial boards of two international journals, and is a past chairperson of the Division of Biological Physics of the American Physical Society. The University of Missouri at St. Louis awarded Moss the title Curators’Professor in 2000.
Stochastic resonance is a nonlinear process whereby the information or detectability of a weak signal can be enhanced by noise. Professor Moss first demonstrated it in sensory biology in the crayfish mechanoreceptor system and later in whole animal behavior.
“Frank Moss put the field of stochastic resonance on the map,Dr. Showalter said.His pioneering studies on the effects of noise in signal transmission in biological systems made people realize that noise could be constructive rather than destructive, allowing signal transmission that would otherwise not be possible.”