Speakers

Priya Rajasethupathy

The Rajasethupathy Lab is interested in understanding memory processing in the mammalian brain during health and disease. We hope to reveal genetic and circuit-level mechanisms that enable the distributed nature of memory representations as they form, stabilize, and reorganize over time. Of particular interest are the mechanisms the brain uses for top-down control of goal-directed memory processing, where prior knowledge is used to guide future learning, in a way that can enable (or impede) cognitive flexibility. The lab uses genomic analyses, neural imaging coupled with real-time manipulations of brain activity, and virtual-reality based rodent behavioral paradigms to explore these questions.

David Schneider

David Schneider is working to uncover how sensory, motor, and learning systems within the brain converge to make predictions about the future. To do so, his laboratory studies a particularly powerful prediction made by the brains of many animals, including mice and humans: the capacity to anticipate the sound of our own actions. By combining augmented reality with experimental techniques for monitoring and manipulating neural activity at synaptic, cellular and circuit levels the Schneider Lab aims to discover how predictions are made by the brain and used to guide behavior.

Rudy Behnia

Sensory perception is one of the most important drivers of animal and human behavior. How do we perceive and make sense of the world around us? The Behnia lab is interested in understanding how neuronal circuits transform sensory information into perceptual representations, and how these representations are modulated by internal and behavioral states to best serve behavior. The lab uses in vivo electrophysiology, two-photon activity imaging, and behavioral studies in Drosophila, combined with modeling, to study two visual modalities: color discrimination and motion detection.

Adrián Rodriguez-Contreras

Intrinsic programs and experience play a coordinated role in brain and sensory system development. Adrián Rodríguez-Contreras aims to understand how neural activity and maternal experience affect the development of subcortical pathways involved in sound processing. The lab is interested in the developmental stage that precedes hearing onset in rodents and particularly, in testing the idea that electrical activity is a cue that modulates interactions between neurons, glial cells and the vascular network in the auditory brainstem sound localization pathway.