Events

Natural visual processing entails a complex interplay between sensory input, behavioral context, and on-going brain dynamics. Our lab seeks to understand how these processes give rise to goal-directed visual behaviors, by exploring the neural circuits mediating ethologically relevant behaviors that laboratory mice perform, including prey capture and distance estimation. We are also implementing novel experimental […]

This talk will highlight recent efforts to generate and analyze spatially resolved molecular datasets to better understand structure–function relationships in the human brain, particularly in the context of complex brain disorders. While single-cell and single-nucleus sequencing approaches have rapidly advanced our ability to define molecularly distinct cell populations, these methods often lack the spatial and […]

Despite decades of research on the properties of ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine neurons, the precise information encoded by these cells in reward learning and motivated behavior remains uncertain. In this talk, I will describe recent work investigating two distinct modalities of the midbrain dopamine system at different levels of investigation. First, I will present […]

There is substantial individual variability in how individuals respond to stress, and a major predictor of this variance is the prior experience of stress. Here, I’ll share data showing that prior stress inflates negative valence signals in an amygdala-hypothalamic circuit and increases stress vulnerability.

How does the brain maintain stable internal representations of the world while also remaining flexible enough to learn, adapt, and predict the future?  This is a central question in systems neuroscience.  In this talk, I will present recent work from my lab that addresses this problem at both the level of network dynamics and the […]