Maryann Martone

Keynote lecture

Will talk about: The possibility and probability of a global neuroscience information framework

Maryann Martone received B. A. from Wellesley College in biological psycholory and Ancient Greek, and her Ph. D. in neuroscience in 1990 from the University of California, San Diego.  Her thesis work on the neurochemical organization of the mammalian neostriatum was performed in the laboratory of Dr. Philip Groves.  After receiving her degree, she joined the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research, then newly founded at the University of California, San Diego by Dr. Mark Ellisman.   The National Center is an NIH-established research resource dedicated to the advancement of 3D multiscale imaging technologies for unraveling the molecular and structural complexity of the nervous system. She is currently the co-driector of the National Center and a Professor-in-Residence in the Department of Neuroscience at UCSD.

Although she continues to investigate the structure of the nervous system using light and electron microscopy, for the past several years, she has been involved in the creation neuroinformatics resources for neuroscience. Dr. Martone is the-principal investigator of the Neuroinformatics Framework project, a national pilot project awarded by the NIH to establish a uniform resource description framework for neuroscience.  She is the head of the Cell Centered Database project (www.ccdb.ucsd.edu), an on-line database for electron tomography and correlated light and electron microscopic data.  Her recent work has focused on building ontologies for neuroscience to facilitate data exchange and integration, and integrating such ontologies into image analysis and data mining tools. She chairs the Neuroinformatics Committee for the Society for Neurosciences and is the US scientific representative to the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF).  Within the INCF, she chairs the program on Ontologies for Neural Structures.