Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Dendritic computation, biologically inspired vision algorithms, neural substrate for learning and memory.
Office: BHE 108
Phone: (213) 740-0334
Fax: (213) 740-1470
Email:
mel@usc.edu
Dr. Mel is associated with
Center for Neural Engineering(CNE) and
Laboratory for Neural Computation(LNC) labs. You can view a video of Dr. Mel discussing his research
here.
Background
Dr. Mel received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley in 1983, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1989. He spent 5 years as a post-doctoral fellow at Caltech working in the laboratory of Professor Christof Koch. Dr. Mel joined the Biomedical Engineering Department at USC in the Fall of 1994, and established the Laboratory for Neural Computation. He is a member of the Neuroscience Graduate Program and has a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology.
Research
Professor Mel's research in Computational Neuroscience involves the use of computer modeling techniques to study various aspects of brain function.
His current research interests include:
• Single neuron computation, with the goal to develop appropriate simplifying abstractions for complex neurons
• Role of dendrites in nonlinear sensory processing, attentional modulation, and contrast gain control
• Learning-related structural plasticity at the axo-dendritic interface
• Neurally-inspired approaches to mid-level vision problems, including contour extraction, color constancy, figure-ground segregation
• 3-D object recognition and visual feature learning
Click Here to meet Dr. Mel's family. 
