Our research aim is to understand the changes that occur in the brain with experience (learning) or disease to yield adaptive or maladaptive changes in its function. In particular, we are working to establish the connections between changes in brain function occurring at different levels of organization—genes and molecules, neurons and synapses, neural circuits, and behavior.
The last several decades of neuroscience research have yielded detailed descriptions of the individual processing units of the brain—neurons and synapses. Our lab’s goal is to determine how the properties of neurons and synapses shape the impressive emergent, computational properties of neural circuits that allow us to perceive the world, to move, and to learn.
To address these challenging scientific questions, we are combining our expertise in analyzing neural circuits with the powerful new, molecular-genetic tools for precisely manipulating specific neurons in a circuit in vivo. This approach enables us to systematically analyze how changes in specific genes or specific properties of individual neurons or synapses influence the computations performed by a neural a circuit, thereby improving or impairing brain function.
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