Things I've built

FIP for multisite calcium recording

Camera-based microscope that you can use to collect freely-moving fiber photometry data from up to 7 different brain regions (or more!). Can also perform simultaneous optogenetics+calcium imaging. Comes with a GUI for running it, and I've also uploaded my scripts for visualizing/processing the data on my GitHub as well.


Want to build one yourself? The Deisseroth Lab offers a Fiber Photometry Workshop where we will teach you! We also have online resources here, and I am (slowly) working on adding a step-by-step instruction page as well here.


Described in the following publication:

  • Kim CK*, Yang SJ*, Pichamoorthy N, Young NP, Kauvar I, Jennings JH, Lerner TN, Berndt A, Lee SY, Ramakrishnan C, Davidson TJ, Inoue M, Bito H, & Deisseroth K. Simultaneous fast measurement of circuit dynamics at multiple sites across the mammalian brain. Nature Methods 13, 325-328 (2016). [https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.3770]

Lickometer + reward delivery system

This is an Arduino-based lickometer/reward-delivery system I built in gradschool. Works great in either head-fixed or freely-moving setups. Cost-effective and scalable for multiple setups.


I've listed step-by-step instructions for building it here.


This design has been used in the following publications:

  • Kim CK*, Yang SJ*, Pichamoorthy N, Young NP, Kauvar I, Jennings JH, Lerner TN, Berndt A, Lee SY, Ramakrishnan C, Davidson TJ, Inoue M, Bito H, & Deisseroth K. Simultaneous fast measurement of circuit dynamics at multiple sites across the mammalian brain. Nature Methods 13, 325-328 (2016). [https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.3770]

  • Kim CK*, Ye L*, Jennings JH, Pichamoorthy N, Tang DD, Yoo A-CW, Ramakrishnan C, & Deisseroth K. Molecular and circuit-dynamical identification of top-down neural mechanisms for restraint of reward seeking. Cell 170, 1013-1027 (2017). [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2017.07.020]

Compact head-fixed virtual reality system for mice

I built a lightweight virtual reality environment for mice during graduate school with my rotation mentor Logan Grosenick (inspired by the original design from my undergraduate lab - Tank Lab).


This design has been used in the following publications:

  • Rajasethupathy P*, Sankaran S*, Marshel JH*, Kim CK, Ferenczi E, Lee SY, Berndt A, Ramakrishnan C, Jaffe A, Lo M, Liston C, & Deisseroth K. Projections from neocortex mediate top-down control of memory retrieval. Nature 526, 653-659 (2015). [https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15389]

  • Grosenick LM*, Broxton M*, Kim CK*, Liston C, Poole B, Yang SJ, Andalman AS, Scharff E, Cohen N, Yizhar O, Ramakrishnan C, Ganguli S, Suppes P, Levoy M, & Deisseroth K. Identification of cellular-activity dynamics across large tissue volumes in the mammalian brain. bioRxiv doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/132688 (2017). [https://doi.org/10.1101/132688]