The Speakers

Jessica Cardin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Yale University. She has a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania and conducted her postdoctoral work at both the University of Pennsylvania and the McGovern Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Cardin laboratory is interested in understanding the mechanisms that promote functional flexibility in cortical circuits and how the activity of those circuits contributes to perception and behavior.

Dan Feldman is a Professor of Neurobiology at UC Berkeley and is a member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. His laboratory studies the function and plasticity of neural circuits in cerebral cortex, using the rodent whisker somatosensory cortex (S1) as a model system. This model has powerful experimental advantages, which allow cortical function to be studied at cellular, circuit, systems and behavioral levels, and allow sensitive measurements of circuit dysfunction in rodent disease models.

Work in his lab has focused on sensory coding, tactile sensory behavior, synaptic and circuit physiology, and how sensory experience regulates circuit development including excitation-inhibition balance.

Gord Fishell is a Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and a group leader at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His developmental neurobiology laboratory is investigating how the architecture of brain circuits are assembled, with a special focus on the diverse populations of inhibitory interneurons that are found in both pallial and subpallial telencephalon.

The current focus of his lab is to explain how a common set of interneurons can integrate into a wide variety of brain structures with distinctly different organizations and functions, and to explore the relationship between developmental gene expression in GABAergic and cholinergic populations and risk genes for neurodevelopmental disorders including ASD.

Anubhuti Goel is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Psychology at UC Riverside. Her lab's research is focused on understanding how sensory discrimination translates into behavior. This sensory discrimination relies on both spatial (e.g., the orientation of a line) and temporal (e.g., duration of a sound) features of stimuli. For example, discriminating the direction of a visual stimulus is critical for playing sports, driving or for judging emotion in facial expressions, while estimating intervals and durations is important for anticipating the onset of a predator's actions, the duration of traffic light, or prosody in speech. Her lab's research goals are centered around two exciting questions: 1. What are the circuit dynamics and mechanisms of how temporal features of sensory input are represented and stored in cortical circuits, and how this information is decoded and utilized to make decisions; 2. How is cross modal sensory input processed in the visual cortex and how this impacts learning and behavior. Insights from this work will provide an understanding of the network defects that lead to abnormal sensory discrimination in disorders such as Autism.

The Goel lab uses a diverse set of techniques including in vivo two photon calcium imaging,electrophysiology, optogenetics, rodent behavior and human psychophysics.

Fenna Krienen is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School. She received her B.A. from the University California, Berkeley and completed her doctoral studies at Harvard University with Randy Buckner, using noninvasive neuroimaging to infer principles of corticocortical and corticocerebellar network architecture in the human brain.

She was a fellow at George Washington University’s Center for Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology, where she developed analytic approaches to unify human transcriptomic and connectomic data sets, before going on to join Steve McCarroll’s lab for postdoctoral training in genetics at Harvard Medical School and at the Broad Institute’s Stanley Center for Neuropsychiatric Disease. There, she used single-cell RNA sequencing to uncover cellular and molecular innovations in primate and rodent interneurons.

Dr. McBain is Deputy Scientific Director for Intramural Research and Chief of the Laboratory of Cellular and Synaptic Neurophysiology at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the NIH. His laboratory aims to understand the development of excitatory and inhibitory synaptic transmission between specific identified neural populations within the hippocampal and cortical formations. Using electrophysiological, immunohistochemical, anatomical, molecular and genetic approaches he hopes to gain insight into the developmental- and activity-dependent regulation of cellular and synaptic efficacy under both physiological and pathophysiological conditions. In particular, they study how the net flow of information in circuits is strongly modulated by inhibitory interneurons, which comprise ~15% of the total neuronal population. His research has shown that interneurons possess a repertoire of voltage gated and ligand gated channels distinct from those of principal neurons. The hope is that, by understanding the basic mechanisms underlying inhibitory interneuron development and integration into their appropriate circuits, one can begin to elucidate the roles played by the various neuronal and non-neuronal elements in specific clinically relevant neural circuit disorders.