We're located on the tenth floor of the Julius and Armand Hammer Health Sciences Center (a "somber blockbuster in self-weathering steel and rose brick" according to the New York City AIA Guide ), at the Washington Heights campus of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, NYC. Being a blockbuster, however, has its advantages, namely the panoramic views of New York that you can sample at the bottom of the page.

Our research is primarily concerned with olfaction, or the sense of smell. For most animals, smell is the primal sense, one they rely on to identify food, predators and mates. Humans can distinguish approximately 10,000 scents, yet we know relatively little about how the nose and the brain cooperate to perform this amazing task.

The background tiling pattern we use for our site is an image of a mouse olfactory bulb, the first relay station in the brain where olfactory information is processed. The prominent blue dots indicate the convergence of several thousand scattered nerve cells from the nose to a specific point. The positions of these dots are the same in every mouse, and this feature is used by animals to encode scents as a two-dimensional pattern of brain activity.

Visit these pages over the coming months as we attempt to bring you the Axel Lab Experience.

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VIEWS FROM THE ROOF

south	southeast	southwest	northwest	east

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Site last updated: Febuary 7, 2003

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