Associate Professor
Director, Laboratory for NeuroEngineering,
Coulter Dept. of Biomedical Engineering,
Georgia Inst. of Technology, 313 Ferst Dr. NW,
Atlanta, GA 30332-0535
steve.potter at bme.gatech.edu
The Potter Group works in Atlanta, GA, where I am an Associate Professor in the Laboratory for NeuroEngineering. This is a collective research unit within the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering shared between Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. I also am Program Faculty for Emory University’s Neuroscience Graduate Program. If you are interested in joining my lab, check out the “How do I join?” link under the Neurolab logo. I am a council member for the Atlanta Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience.
Courses Taught
- BMED/BIOL 4752 Introductory Neuroscience (syllabus)
- BMED 4400 Neuroengineering Fundamentals (syllabus)
- BMED 8813 Hybrid Neural Microsystems
- BMED 1300 Problems in Biomedical Engineering
See more on my Teaching Page!
Here is my own Curriculum Vitae in Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PotterCV.pdf)
To see Google Scholar’s most current list of my papers, including how many times they have been cited, click here. For a complete list of papers and abstracts, see our Publications page or Academia.edu, which has a nice interface for browsing abstracts.
At Caltech, I worked jointly in the labs of Scott Fraser and Jerry Pine. Jerry is a professor of Biophysics. Scott is the head of the Caltech Biological Imaging Center. In 1994, we put together one of the first 2-Photon laser-scanning microscopes. This is a relatively new (~1990) type of optical microscope that allows viewing of living specimens for longer periods with less photobleaching and less phototoxicity than with other fluorescence microscopes.
- More info about 2-Photon Microscopy, including lots of pretty pictures.
- The Pine Lab home page.
- Our Publications List
Projects
Here are some other “home pages” about me:
Emory Neuroscience PhD program’s blurb about me
Institute for Bioengineering & Bioscience (IBB) at Tech’s 10-min video about our research
I don’t waste time with Facebook, Linkedin or other social networking sites, so don’t bother trying to “friend” me. I prefer higher bandwidth interactions in person, or by phone. Schedule those by email or catch me at a conference.
- This list is a bit out of date; Prod me to update it…
- New Neuroscience Technology for Studying Learning In Vitro: The Animat in a Dish.
- Controlling epilepsy with multielectrode stimulation (in collaboration with Dr. Robert Gross at Emory).
- Multielectrode Array Recording and Stimulation of Cultured Neural Nets
- 2-Photon time-lapse of morphological dynamics in dendritic spines
- High-speed imaging of neural activity
- Development of the mammalian olfactory system, a 2-photon imaging collaboration with Prof. Peter Mombaerts then at the Rockefeller University (now head of Molecular Neurogenetics at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt).
Other Interests
I am interested in many fields related to brains and thinking, such as
- artificial intelligence
- cognitive architechtures
- robotics (Georgia Tech’s Robotics & Intelligent Machines program)
- the scientific study of consciousness
- the mechanisms of creativity
- artificial life
- Artificial Neural Networks
- self-organization, chaos, feedback systems, and complex dynamical systems (such as brains!).
Essays, book reviews, etc., by Steve Potter
(Under construction indefinitely…)
- What can Artificial Intelligence get from Neuroscience? From a chapter I wrote for a book by attendees of the 50th Anniversary Summit of Artificial Intelligence, July 2006.
- Review of Norman Doidge’s book, “The brain that changes itself: Stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science.”
- Networking on the Volkscomputer: the Wave of the Future. Apple Computer had an essay contest when I was a grad student at UC Irvine. I think this idea was a bit too far ahead of its time for them to appreciate it–I didn’t win the free MacSE
- When Technology Becomes Us Review of Andy Clark’s “Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence”
- The Meaning of “Life”. A paper I wrote in college, to get at what we mean when we talk about living vs. non-living things.
- DNA Is Not a Blueprint! Essay about how information is layered in biological systems, and often drawn from the environment.
- Just Pretending. Essay about the role of pretending in children’s play and in learning.
- Review of “Successful Scientific Writing”, by Janice R. Matthews, et al.
- Other book reviews I wrote on Amazon
The Group Mind
For two years, I led a reading group on books about the mind, at Pasadena’s premier independent bookstore, Vroman’s (http://www.vromansbookstore.com/).
Books we read and discussed:
- A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness, by Merlin Donald
- The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, by Ray Kurzweil
- Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, by Antonio Damasio
- Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, by Douglas Hofstadter
- Kinds of Minds: Towards and Understanding of Consciousness, by Daniel C. Dennett
- Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, by V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee
- Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and the World Together Again, by Andy Clark
- Evolving Brains, by John Allman
- The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackmore
- The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, by Michael Tomasello
- The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky
- A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination, by Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi
- Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind, by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen
- Consciousness Explained, by Daniel C. Dennett
Potter Group Publications and Abstracts
Steve’s (increasingly out of date) Bibliographies
- Multiphoton microscopy papers
- Multielectrode substrates for cultured neural nets
With Google Scholar, finding obscure papers is much easier these days.
Avocations
When I used to have spare time, I dabbled in a variety of activities, including bicycling, hang gliding, racquetball, hiking, reading, thinking about thinking, collecting rocks and other heavy objects, remote-control sailplane flying, photography, fixing and building things, creating unusual art, and body-surfing. Ah, to be a postdoc again!
Now I vicariously enjoy my wife’s creative endeavors. Check out her hand-made greeting cards!