John Rinzel

Official Story

I obtained a BS in Engineering Science (Univ of Florida, 1967) and participated in the co-op program, enabling me to work during alternate trimesters in Oak Ridge, TN where I learned and enjoyed scientific computing. My graduate career in Applied Math at NYU's Courant Institute was in two phases, MS, 1968 and PhD, 1973. It was interrupted by a two-year stint at the NIH (Division of Computer Research and Technology, DCRT) from 1968-1970. While at the NIH I came to know and collaborate with Dr Wilfrid Rall and developed an interest/passion of math/computational modeling of neurons. My PhD thesis was about analyzing models for nerve impulse propagation. After graduation I returned to the NIH/DCRT as an independent research mathematician but transferred after two years to the Mathematical Research Branch, NIDDK (Rall was a PI in the MRB). The directorship of NIDDK was very open-minded about basic research and I was well supported with postdoc positions, that would have been difficult in those days to obtain as a junior professor from either a neuroscience or mathematics department setting. The NIH was a terrific environment and I was able to pursue my own topics and establish several productive and satisfying collaborations for myself and postdocs, intramurally and extramurally, pursuing research in neuronal modeling, cell and circuit level. I also had adjunct teaching positions at the Univ of MD and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. In the mid-90s I was recruited to NYU, with a joint appointment in the Center for Neural Science and the Courant Institute a perfect fit for me. Over these past 25 years my working group and I have collaborated with several different neuroscientists, many here at NYU, developing neuromechanistic models, especially in auditory processing. I teach in both departments. New opportunities arose here at NYU for my working group -- to carry out experiments -- both electrophysiology (auditory brain stem, in vitro, e-phys rig courtesy of Dan Sanes) and human behavior in auditory perception (psychophysics in our own sound booth).

Unofficial Story

I grew up in a small town near Milwaukee. In Catholic school through grade eight I was not a diligent student but restless and oppositional. Going to high school was an awakening; I started to like learning and even turn away from my dreamy aspiration to become a long-haul truck driver in order "to see the world." We moved to Florida's west coast into a primarily retirement community at the start of my junior year. During this huge adjustment I developed into a serious student, although still somewhat antagonistic and primarily interested in hot cars, portraying American Graffiti in Clearwater. Like most of my college-headed peers I applied to one of the state schools, University of Florida. I chose mechanical engineering as a major but became disillusioned with it during sophomore year.

Feeling a need to get direct exposure to what engineers "really do" I entered the co-op program. My position at Union Carbide in Oak Ridge turned out not to be in engineering but rather in the computer center. We had state-of-the-art IBM 7090 mainframes having all of 32K RAM. I was in a numerical analysis and scientific computing group. I loved it. At UF, I switched my major to Engineering Science, more theory-oriented. My research mentor at UF (who came from academics in NYC), pushed strongly for me to apply to the Courant Institute. I was awarded a Computing Assistantship at COURANT (there were very few TAs in math) ! Perfect for me !

The first year: my bride Cathy (an Oak Ridge girl) took an office job at the Metropolitan Museum, I studied constantly, we joined protests against the raging VietNam War, and I passed my written qualifier exam in early 1968 and my HOT 64 Chevy Malibu was stolen in Queens. THEN in March 1968, draft deferments for grad students were terminated. My life trajectory was detouring. After a good bit of scrambling I applied for and was accepted to become an officer in the US Public Health Service and serve at the NIH computer research center in Bethesda. Tony Fauci and many others of us 'yellow berets' were at the NIH; it almost had a campus atmosphere. I knew nothing about and had no particular care for biology or medicine. My first project was to help develop algorithms for spike separation (ask me). This challenge did not relate to anything familiar in my training and it all seemed so ad hoc/heuristic. I pleaded with the group director ("I hate this project") if I could be part of some effort that involved mathematical physics. This very kind director introduced me to Wilfrid Rall, a PI in the "Diabetes Institute" (now NIDDK), and allowed me to pursue a project with Rall fulltime: developing solutions for voltage response to localized inputs on neuron models with branching dendrites including, OMG, input to a dendritic spine. This was like a dream Rall was super kind, super smart with amazing physical intuition, modest and mentoring. I developed a very close relationship with him and found my passion in this endeavor and, so timely, as the field of computational neuroscience was emerging.

I returned to Courant in Fall 1970 (having satisfied my military obligation without being in uniform) to finish my PhD so that I could pursue my new passion. Math biology was growing at Courant and my PhD advisor, Joe Keller, was involved. Joe was among the world's top applied mathematicians (for decades) and suggested to me a problem about stability of the traveling impulse solution to nerve conduction equations, like the Hodgkin-Huxley cable equations. Of course, I knew that I had to pass oral quals and that was stressful (ask me), all that mathy analysis stuff. After passing orals, I pursued full time the stability question. I succeeded at that and learned so much from being around the Keller gang (ask me). NOTE: I learned from both of my mentors the value of formulating and analyzing idealized models.

I completed my PhD in 4 yrs (1973). Math Biology was a hot topic in applied math and I was among the very few PhDs with applied math and theoretical-biology experience. I had good job offers in a tight academic market then: U MD and RPI as well as two different research labs at Los Alamos and the NIH (computer research center). I chose NIH. Wil and I wrapped our findings into two major papers and some conference proceedings. Through Wil I was then building contacts with the neuroscience and biophysics communities. However, by 1975 I was feeling that the computer division was not a growth situation for me. I was offered a transfer to the MRB, as a tenured PI. That transfer opened the door for me to establish my working group of postdocs, visitors and even to host PhD students at their thesis-research phase… and without having to obtain research grants. The next 20 years were exciting and satisfying; I couldn't have been in a better situation. In 1981 I became Chief of the MRB (now called the Lab of Biological Modeling). Among my personal working group over the years were Bard Ermentrout, Xiao-Jing Wang, Shihab Shamma, Victoria Booth, Rob Butera, and others in, or previously in, the MRB: Gordon Shepherd, Idan Segev, David Lipman, Alan Weinstein, I was maybe Growing Up. But the NIDDK intramural directorship changed (early 90s??), becoming more focused and boundaries were developing.

It was timely that an NYU search for interdisciplinary positions involved Dave McLaughlin with Tony Movshon exploring candidates for a computational neuroscience joint appointment. I was contacted and one thing led to another and Cathy and I found ourselves back at NYU in 1997, but with a house and many friends back in Bethesda; our sons had completed college. During our first year Cathy realized that she terribly missed our MD community and her professional stature in the excellent Montgomery County elementary school counseling program. Hence began our two-city arrangement, allowing us to spend summers and lots of other times together in NYC or Bethesda and with our sons (who laid roots in NYC).

Have I Grown Up? Here, at NYU, my research has expanded into new areas, including involvement in and directing experiments - that would have been hard to arrange at the NIH. There's still a lot that I want to explore and learn. I feel incredibly fortunate and grateful for the colleagues I've had at the NIH and NYU, truly giants professionally, generous and supportive on personal levels. I look back at my co-oping and 2-years of draft-evasion at the NIH as extraordinary 'internships' enabling me to identify avenues that I chose to by-pass and to find a passion, and lucking out that someone would pay me to pursue it.