Rodolfo R. Llinás (born 1934) is a Colombian neuroscientist, and currently the Thomas and Suzanne Murphy Professor of Neuroscience and Chairman of the department of Physiology & Neuroscience at the NYU School of Medicine. He attended the Gimnasio Moderno school and received his MD from the Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá in 1959 and his PhD in 1965 from the Australian National University working under Sir John Eccles. Llinás has published over 500 scientific articles.

Work

He has studied the electrophysiology of single neurons in the cerebellum, the thalamus, the cerebral cortex, the entorhinal cortex, the hippocampus, the vestibular system, the inferior olive and the spinal cord. He has studied synaptic transmitter release in the squid giant synapse. He has studied human brain function using magnetoencephalography (MEG) on the basis of which he introduced the concept of Thalamocortical dysrhythmia.

Contributions

Llinás has written that the brain evolved because organisms needed to move around without running into other organisms or objects.^[1]

Further contributions include:

• Discovery of dendritic inhibition in central neurons (at the mammalian motoneuron).
• The functional organization of the cerebellar cortex neuronal circuits.
• Defining cerebellar function from an evolutionary perspective.
• First description of electrical coupling in the mammalian CNS ( mesencephalic trigeminal nucleus)
• First determination of presynaptic calcium current, under voltage clamp, at the squid giant synapse.
• Discovery that vertebrate neurons (cerebellar Purkinje cell) can generate calcium-dependent spikes .
• Discovery of the P-type calcium channel in the Purkinje cells.
• Discovery of low threshold spikes generated by low voltage activated calcium conductaces (presently known as due to T-type calcium channel) in inferior olive and thalamus neurons
• Asserting the law of no interchangeability of neurons, which it is known as Llinás' law.
• Direct demonstration of calcium concentration microdomains at the presynaptic active zone.
• Utilization of magnetoencephalography in clinical research.
• Discovery of subthreshold membrane potential oscillations in the inferior olive, thalamus and entorhinal cortex.
• The discovery of Thalamocortical dysrhythmia .
• Artificial olivo-cerebellar motor control system as part of the project BAUV (Undersea Vehicle) of the US Navy developed by P. Bandyopadhyay.

Memberships

Llinás is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences (1986), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1996), American Philosophical Society (1996), the Real Academia Nacional de Medicina (Spain) (1996) and the French Academy of Science (2002). Dr. Llinás has received honorary degrees from the following universities:

• Universidad de Salamanca (Spain) (1985)
• Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (Spain) (1993)
• National University of Colombia (1994)
• Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain (1997)
• Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, (1998)
• Toyama University, Toyama, Japan (2005)
• University of Pavia, Italy (2006)
• Gold Medal of CSIC, Spain (2012)

He was also the chairman of NASA/Neurolab Science Working Group.