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| Department of Physiology and Pharmacology Ronald Millecchia  Ronald Millecchia
Associate Professor of Physiology Interim Department Chairman (Jan. 2007 - Jul. 2007) Ph.D., Rockefeller University, New York, 1969 Postdoctoral Fellowship, Reed College, Portland, OR Phone: 304-293-1518 Email: rmillecchia@hsc.wvu.edu Research Interests Somatosensory physiology - mammalian spinal cord, computer modeling and electrophysiological instrumentation. Description of Research I am currently working on an analysis of the primary sensory projections into the spinal cords of cats. One of the goals of the study is to develop a quantitative model of the neural process which maps the surface of the skin onto the dorsal horn cells in the spinal cord. Maps are ubiquitous computational devices used throughout the nervous system, so a better understanding of such mapping procedures can have far reaching effects on our understanding of the workings of the nervous system in general. Recent Publications Brown P B, H R Koerber, and R Millecchia. Assembly of the dorsal horn somatotopic map. Somatosens Mot Res 14:93-106, 1997. Wang L, R Millecchia, and P B Brown. Correlation of peripheral innervation density and dorsal horn map scale. J Neurophysiol 78:689-702, 1997. Brown P B and R Millecchia. Visualization of significant differences in somatotopic maps: a distributed t-test. J Neurosci Methods 77:9-24, 1997. Brown P B, R Millecchia, J J Lawson, S Stephens, P Harton, and J C Culberson. Dorsal horn spatial representation of simple cutaneous stimuli. J Neurophysiol 79:983-998, 1998. Brown P B, P Harton, R Millecchia, J Lawson, T Kunjara-Na-Ayudhya, S Stephens, M A Miller, L Hicks, and J Culberson. Spatial convergence and divergence between cutaneous afferent axons and dorsal horn cells are not constant. J Comp Neurol 420 :277-290, 2000. |
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