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ABOUT FRANCISCO

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ABOUT ME

Upon finishing my diploma studies in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering, at the Universidad de Oriente of Cuba, I became increasingly interested in the nervous system and its ways. After graduating, I joined the Institute of Cell Biology and Neuroscience in Frankfurt to study, under the supervision of Dr. Julio Hechavarria and Prof. Manfred Kössl, the neuronal coding of naturalistic auditory stimuli in the bat auditory and frontal cortices. Mainly, I am interested in neuronal computations supported by oscillatory mechanisms at the cortical level, based on responses of individual neurons and local-field potentials. Additionally, I am particularly fascinated by the neural mechanisms underlying sensory processing and perception, social interactions and cognitive neuroscience in general. Basically a nerd, I love reading, history, philosophy, football… and beer.

ABOUT MY PROJECT

The amazing, mind-numbing feat of assigning meaning to sounds (and potentially acting upon it) is only possible thanks to innumerable interactions in the brain. However, precisely what these interactions are or their particular properties remain largely a mystery. In my PhD project, I try to unravel functional mechanisms that could underpin the representation of naturalistic acoustic stimuli in the auditory system, with an emphasis on auditory and frontal cortices. Using a combination of electrophysiological techniques, we have described that neuronal oscillations constitute at least a fingerprint of temporal coding in the auditory cortex during the processing of artificial and natural sounds comprising discernible timescales. This may or may not be supported by auditory areas in the frontal cortex during passive listening, which is what we are currently attempting to elucidate. In future research, I plan to tackle long-range synchronization in the brain during vocalization production and social interactions, with hopes of contributing to the understanding of large-scale neuronal mechanisms supporting behaviours that could involve, in principle, more than one individual.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

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  1. Gonzalez-Palomares, E., Lopez-Jury, L., Garcia-Rosales, F. and Hechavarria, J.C., 2020. Enhanced representation of natural sound sequences in the ventral auditory midbrain. Brain Structure and Function: 1-17

  2. *Garcia-Rosales, F., López-Jury, L., González-Palomares, E., Cabral-Calderín, Y., Kössl, M. & Hechavarría, J. C. 2020. Phase‐amplitude coupling profiles differ in frontal and auditory cortices of bats. Eur J Neurosci 2020; 00: 1– 19. 

  3. Weineck K., García-Rosales F., and Hechavarría JC. 2019. "Fronto-striatal oscillations predict vocal output in bats." bioRxiv: 724112. (aceppted manuscript, PLOS Biology)

  4. López‐Jury L, Mannel A, García‐Rosales F, & Hechavarria JC. 2019. Modified synaptic dynamics predict neural activity patterns in an auditory field within the frontal cortex. European Journal of Neuroscience

  5. García-Rosales F, Röhrig D, Weineck K, Röhm M, Lin Y H, Cabral-Calderin Y, Kössl M, Hechavarria JC. 2019. Laminar specificity of oscillatory coherence in the auditory cortex. Brain Structure and Function, 224(8), 2907-2924.

  6. García-Rosales F, Beetz MJ, Cabral-Calderin Y, Kössl M, Hechavarria JC. 2018. Neuronal coding of multiscale temporal features in communication sequences within the bat auditory cortex. Communications Biology. 20; 1:200. doi: 10.1038/s42003-018-0205-5. eCollection 2018.

  7. García-Rosales F, Martin LM, Beetz MJ, Cabral-Calderin Y, Kössl M, Hechavarria JC. Low-Frequency Spike-Field Coherence Is a Fingerprint of Periodicity Coding in the Auditory Cortex. 2018. iScience. 2018 Nov 30;9:47-62. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2018.10.009. 

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