David Linden is Professor of Neuroscience at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. Following undergraduate work at the University of California, Berkeley with Joe Martinez, he performed his doctoral research in the lab of Aryeh Routtenberg at Northwestern University, examining the role of protein kinase C in long term synaptic potentiation and modulation of voltage-gated ion channels. In 1990, he began postdoctoral work with John Connor at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology, where, together with several colleagues, he developed a cell culture system to study cerebellar long-term synaptic depression, a putative memory mechanism. He joined the faculty of the Department of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1992, where he remains, propped up at his rig by an impressive stack of unread documents.
Linden’s laboratory has used single cell recording and imaging techniques in brain slices and cultures to examine the cellular and molecular basis of information storage, often using the cerebellum as a model system. Other interests of the lab include synaptic transmission, neuron-glia communication, ion channel modulation, and, more recently, dynamic imaging of neuronal, glial and vascular fine structure in the intact brain. A list of some of the lab’s recent papers may be found here.
Linden has a long standing interest in scientific communication, serving on the Editorial Boards of Journal of Neurophysiology, Neuron, and The Cerebellum. He is author of a neuroscience book for a general audience, The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams and God (Belknap/Harvard, 2007). He intermittently blogs at compassofpleasure.org.