Giocomo probes the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying cortical neural circuits involved in spatial navigation and memory.
[2] Motivated to go into medicine, Giocomo worked as a mental health counsellor at a local clinic as well as at the Veterans Affairs Hospital where she also conducted research on psychiatric illnesses.
[2] As she began to realize the lack of available treatment options for mental illnesses, she became inspired by her psychology and statistics professor, Dr. Roger Kirk, and changed her path to pursue a deeper understanding of neurobiology instead of medicine.
In a first author paper published in Science, Giocomo found that grid cells exhibit differences in frequency of subthreshold membrane potential oscillations in the entorhinal cortex across the dorsal to ventral axis.
[7] She concluded that, taking into account the experimental data, both the attractor dynamics and oscillatory interference models help to explain the properties of grid cell firing in the entorhinal cortex.
[1] The lab was located at the Center for Neural Computation at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, so she moved to Norway with her husband for her postdoctoral work.
[1] She spent four years in Norway working with the Mosers and published many influential papers that greatly impacted the grid cell field.
[13] Another goal of the Giocomo Lab's research program is to explore the ontogenesis of medial entorhinal cortex topography to understand how gradients in ion channels develop to give rise to spatial mapping and neural representations of space.