Rate My Professor Alon Poleg-Polsky

Alon Poleg-Polsky, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. He also holds affiliations with the Department of Ophthalmology and the Neuroscience Graduate Program. Poleg-Polsky's research investigates the mechanisms enabling neural circuits in the retina to efficiently detect, amplify, and transmit relevant visual information under diverse physiological conditions. His laboratory employs advanced experimental techniques including patch clamp electrophysiology, two-photon microscopy, in vivo recording of visual reflexes, spatial transcriptomics, and machine learning-based receptive field mapping, alongside computational modeling with NEURON simulations. Key projects explore changes in retinal function in disease models such as traumatic brain injury and glaucoma, spatial distribution and gene expression specializations of mouse retinal ganglion cells, and computational principles underlying motion detection.

Poleg-Polsky completed his MD and PhD at the Technion in Israel, conducting graduate work with Prof. Jackie Schiller on the role of dendritic NMDA receptors in cortical pyramidal neurons. There, he demonstrated that dendritic spikes form independent computational units, enriching neuronal information processing, plasticity, and excitatory-inhibitory interactions. He pursued postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Jeffrey Diamond at the National Institutes of Health, where he elucidated novel network and synaptic mechanisms ensuring reliable direction selectivity in retinal circuits, including multiplicative scaling of visual signals by NMDA receptors that enhances signal fidelity. His career contributions include high-impact publications such as 'A Complete Spatial Map of Mouse Retinal Ganglion Cells Reveals Density and Gene Expression Specializations' (bioRxiv, 2025), 'Machine Learning Discovers Numerous New Computational Principles Supporting Elementary Motion Detection' (bioRxiv, 2025), 'Motor learning drives dynamic patterns of intermittent myelination on learning-activated axons' (Nature Neuroscience, 2022), 'Classical center-surround receptive fields facilitate novel object detection in retinal bipolar cells' (Nature Communications, 2022), 'Dynamic compartmental computations in tuft dendrites of layer 5 neurons during motor behavior' (Science, 2022), 'Functional Compartmentalization within Starburst Amacrine Cell Dendrites in the Retina' (Cell Reports, 2018), and 'NMDA receptors multiplicatively scale visual signals and enhance directional motion discrimination in retinal ganglion cells' (Neuron, 2016).