Victor Quintanar-Zilinskas

Victor Quintanar-Zilinskas is a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine. He includes among his research pursuits the systems biology of transcription factor gradient maintenance over long distances and the developmental effects of mechanical forces; these lines of work are pursued with Ed Monuki. His research focus, advised by Zoran Nenadic and linked with the interesting experimental results of his collaborators Xiangmin Xu, Ron Frostig, and Larry Cahill, is the emergence of system-level information processing properties of many-neuron (on the order of 1000s) networks. SFI faculty member Arthur Lander is, in one way or another, involved with all of Victor's projects.

Victor intends for his research focus to, in the near future, evolve into the study of the following two phenomena (the second requiring understanding of the first). One, the working brain frequently witnesses brief episodes of self-organized synchrony between groups of neurons. Two, complex dynamics generate information (Turing patterns are an illustration of this idea); this is difficult to study in the brain, but there are modeling (and EEG analysis) results to suggest that probability inferences (and and information that is fundamentally an interpretation of, rather than intrinsic to, sensory input, e.g. instinctive evaluation of odorant toxicity) are among the types of cognitively useful information that the brain's dynamics can produce.

Victor was raised in Palo Alto, CA and his interests and outlooks are heavily influenced by his upbringing in Silicon Valley's technoculture. He double-majored in math and biology at Santa Clara University (class of 2009), where he did his first computational neuroscience research, sparking his current interests. He also worked with Geoffrey Bowker (who was, at the time, at Santa Clara University) to characterize the work practices of scholar communities that study complex systems (e.g. networks of ecologists that study various facets of the same ecosystem) and explain them in the context of the historical trajectory of scientific understanding of the systems under study. The study's conclusion, which will be appreciated by but unsurprising to this page's SFI-affiliated readers, was that the increasing temporal resolution of data is encouraging a shift from the study of system processes to the study of salient events (e.g. shifts between stable states of the composition of an ocean bacteria population; large storms). Victor's current "applied philosophy" interest is the connections between Constructivism, creativity theory, and interdisciplinarity--and in these ideas informing educational practice.