Jon Kaas

Jon Kaas is a Professor in Vanderbilt University and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He has made fundamental discoveries about the organization of the mammalian brain, including the description of many areas of the cerebral cortex and their neuroplasticity.

Work from the Kaas laboratory is notable for its emphasis on evolutionary biology. Through a comparative approach, Prof. Kaas tries to understand how complex brains evolved from ancestor forms which had relatively few areas. Some of the career highlights include:

* Some of the first descriptions of topographically organized areas in the extrastriate cortex of primates, including the middle temporal area MT, or V5 (Allman and Kaas, 1971), and the dorsomedial area, or V6.
* Demonstration of changes in the topographic representation of sensory organs in the cerebral cortex after lesions of the sensory organs (Kaas et al. 1990; see also neuroplasticity).

References

*Allman JM, Kaas JH (1971) A representation of the visual field in the caudal third of the middle tempral gyrus of the owl monkey (Aotus trivirgatus). Brain Res 31(1):85-105.
*Allman JM, Kaas JH (1975) The dorsomedial cortical visual area: a third tier area in the occipital lobe of the owl monkey (Aotus trivirgatus). Brain Res 100(3):473-487.
*Kaas JH, Krubitzer LA, Chino YM, Langston AL, Polley EH, Blair N (1990) Reorganization of retinotopic cortical maps in adult mammals after lesions of the retina. Science 248(4952):229-231.