About us

The CoNe Lab studies how single-cell mechanisms of synaptic plasticity give rise to network level learning and in turn, the development of cognitive maps which support memory and inference. We are a theoretical lab, biologically grounded and tightly coupled to experimental collaborators, based in the Program in Memory and Longevity at UT Southwestern's O'Donnell Brain Institute. We build multi-scale, mechanistically grounded models that make quantitative, testable predictions that bridge cellular biophysics, network computation, and behavior.

  • We study how synaptic plasticity, including behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity (BTSP), supports learning across scales, from dendrites to single cells to networks to behavior, and how these processes break down in neurodegeneration.

Research

  • We study how the brain builds internal maps of the world and infers hidden structure, particularly in complex and uncertain environments, drawing on predictive representations and hippocampal replay.

  • We study how the biophysics of neuromodulation can function as a real-time controller, shaping network dynamics, excitability, and plasticity. We study different neuromodulators’ network effects without explicitly hard-coding their historically assigned roles in surprise, novelty, reward prediction error, etc.

People

Ian Cone, Ph.D

Principal Investigator

Dr. Ian Cone is a computational neuroscientist studying how synaptic plasticity shapes learning, memory, and cognitive mapping at the network level. His lab builds multi-scale, biophysically grounded theoretical models that span single-cell and dendritic mechanisms, network dynamics, and behavior. Working closely with experimental collaborators, the group aims to explain how specific plasticity rules give rise to computation across the circuit.

Dr. Cone earned his PhD in Applied Physics from Rice University, and subsequently conducted postdoctoral training with Claudia Clopath and Rui Ponte Costa at Imperial College London and the University of Oxford. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Peter O'Donnell Jr. Brain Institute (OBI) and the department of Biomedical Engineering at UT Southwestern Medical Center, where he leads the CoNe Lab within the Program in Memory and Longevity.

[Google Scholar] [CV] [Email]

Publications

Ian Cone, Claudia Clopath, Rui Ponte Costa (2025). "Credit Assignment via Behavioral Timescale Synaptic Plasticity: Theoretical Frameworks." bioRxiv. DOI: 10.1101/2025.06.12.659336

Ian Cone, Claudia Clopath, Harel Shouval (2024). "Learning to express reward prediction error-like dopaminergic activity requires plastic representations of time." Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-50205-3

Ian Cone, Claudia Clopath (2024). "Latent representations in hippocampal network model co-evolve with behavioral exploration of task structure." Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-44871-6

Ian Cone, Harel Shouval (2021). "Behavioral Time Scale Plasticity of Place Fields: Mathematical Analysis." Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. DOI: 10.3389/fncom.2021.640235

Ian Cone, Harel Shouval (2021). "Learning precise spatiotemporal sequences via biophysically realistic learning rules in a modular, spiking network." eLife. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.63751

Contact

Ian.Cone@UTSouthwestern.edu 
6124 Harry Hines Blvd.
Suite NS04.240
Dallas, TX 75390-8823