
David joined the lab in 2011 as a PhD student in the BME program, after completing a BS and MS from Marquette University. David was an Allen Edmonds Scholar, Anthony and Rose Bagoszzi Medical Research Fellow, and a Richard Jobling Fellow during his years at Marquette University.
His research in our laboratory focused on the function of the cerebellum. He discovered the theory of memory of errors, which suggests that during learning, the brain not only learns from a perdiction error, but also stores a memory of the error event itself.
He solved two fundamental problems: how Purkinje cells of the cerebellum anatomically organize into computational units that predict motion of the body, and how these cells learn from their prediction error and alter behavior on subsequent movements.
During his tenure as a graduate student, he received an NRSA award from the National Institutes of Health in 2014. In 2015 he was awarded the Mette Strand Award for outstanding research by a graduate student at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In 2016 he was awarded the Siebel Prize in Bioengineering. He won the 2016 David Yue Award for outstanding research by a BME PhD student. He completed his PHD in 2016 and subsequently was appointed as Distinguished Fellow of the Science of Learning Institute to complete a post-doctoral fellowship in our lab.
In 2017, he was awarded the The Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience by the Society for Neuroscience. This award recognizes a young neuroscientist's outstanding PhD thesis in the general area of behavioral neuroscience.
In 2018, his work as a postdoctoral fellow was recognized by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine on Young Investigator's Day, where he was awarded the Paul Ehrlich Award.
In addition to his scientific accomplishments, David made tremendous contributions to our laboratory, as well as our community of scientist at Hopkins. He completely rewrote the low-level code that we employ to control all of our instruments, including our robots and eye-tracking systems. He wrote the software for behavioral and neurophysiological data acquisition in our non-human primate studies. In addition, he wrote the web-based database management system that the Johns Hopkins BME PhD Program uses to monitor progress of the graduate students.
Encoding of error and learning to correct that error by the Purkinje cells of the cerebellum. David J. Herzfeld, Yoshiko Kojima, Robi Soetedjo, and Reza Shadmehr (2018) Nature Neuroscience.
Movement vigor as a trait-like attribute of individuality. Thomas R. Reppert, Ioannis Rigas, David J. Herzfeld, Ehsan Sedaghat-Nejad, Oleg Komogortsev, and Reza Shadmehr (2018) Journal of Neurophysiology.
The role of error-sensitivity in motor adaptation. David J. Herzfeld (2016) PhD Thesis, Johns Hopkins University.
Cerebellar output encodes a corrective saccade command. David Herzfeld and Reza Shadmehr (2016) European Journal of Neuroscience 44:2528-2530.
Encoding of action by the Purkinje cells of the cerebellum. DJ Herzfeld, Y Kojima, R Soetedjo, and R Shadmehr (2015) Nature 526:439-442.
Motor variability is not noise, but grist for the learning mill. DJ Herzfeld and R Shadmehr (2014) Nature Neuroscience 18:66-67.
Cerebellum estimates the sensory state of the body. DJ Herzfeld and R Shadmehr (2014) Trends in Cognitive Neurosciences 18:66-67.
A memory of errors in sensorimotor learning. DJ Herzfeld, PA Vaswani, MK Marko, and R Shadmehr (2014) Science 345:1349-1353.
Contributions of the cerebellum and the motor cortex to acquistion and retention of motor memories. DJ Herzfeld, D Pastor, AM Haith, Yves Rossetti, R Shadmehr, and J O'Shea (2014) NeuroImage 98:147-158.
Publications
Publications
David Herzfeld
David Herzfeld