Dr. Sorinel Adrian Oprisan, assistant professor of physics at the College of Charleston (CofC), has won a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the most prestigious of the foundation’s awards and the first for the Department of Physics and Astronomy at CofC. The award provides $500,000 to support up to five years of computational neuroscience research and educational outreach. Oprisan's project,

Previously, we have used open-loop-phase resetting curves (PRCs) that were tabulated for postsynaptic neurons using a perturbation equal to a burst in the presynaptic neuron to predict the patterns exhibited by a closed-loop circuit containing these bursting neurons. This requires the assumption that the phase resetting observed in the circuit is the same with or without the feedbackthat occurs in a closed circuit, yet both the duration and waveform