Research Projects

Project Summary: Dynamic mapping of complex brain circuits by monitoring and modulating brain activity at large scale will enhance our understanding of brain functions, such as sensation, thought, emotion, and action. This knowledge will ultimately help to better treat and prevent neurological disorders. Real-time interfacing with the brain also has the potential to enhance our perceptual, motor, and cognitive capabilities, as well as to restore sensory and motor functions lost through injuries or diseases.

Abstract Recent advances in technology have enabled the sampling of activity from up to a few hundred neurons within a limited area of the brain. These innovations reveal the importance of understanding neural interactions beyond the local, micro-scale – and highlight the current inability to record from sufficient volumes of tissue to understand the meso- and macro-scale computations. We propose to overcome this hurdle, increasing the planar reach and spatial densities of recording sites by using our recently established 3D nanoparticle printing method.

Project Summary: Neuropeptides are key components of modulation across the central nervous system. These short peptides are released from neurons and non-neuronal cells and have powerful modulatory effect on neuronal activity leading to changes in sensory perception, motor output and complex behaviors. Currently there are no experimental tools that can manipulate the release and functions of these important neuromodulators with high spatial and temporal resolutions.

A fully biological platform for monitoring mesoscale neural activity One of the barriers to understanding the human brain is due to its geometry. Accessing brain tissue at single cell resolution has classically involved implanting electrodes (metallic or optical) directly into the brain.

Project Summary / Abstract In this research proposal, we present a new approach for recording and transmitting neural signals at the level of single neurons using micron-scale distributed implants referred to as micro-probes (mProbes). Fully wireless and 100x100um in size, standalone mProbes are injected into the brain at nearly unlimited locations in the sub-arachnoid space.

Project Summary To further our understanding of the function of neural circuits, there is a need for new tools that can collect simultaneous measurements from large populations of neurons involved in a common neural computation and provide precise functional modulation. Optical imaging in awake animals expressing calcium indicators provides real-time functional and spatial information from individual neurons within local neural circuits.

Project Summary: Large-scale measurement of individual neuronal activity in intact animals will accelerate the understanding of the brain and treatment of neurological disorders. Fortunately, the last decade has witnessed dramatic improvements in optical methods to record neural activity based on new genetically encoded calcium- or voltage-dependent fluorescence proteins.

Project Summary: We propose to develop fast spatial light modulators (SLM) to address the need for optical hardware compatible with the current fast genetically encoded sensors and actuators. SLMs are versatile optical components that enable beam steering and holographic projection of arbitrary patterns. They have recently been used for patterned optogenetic excitation of specific sets of neurons in the brain. However, current experiments are limited by the low speed of available spatial light modulators (~100 Hz).

An Ultra High-Density Virtual Array with Nonlinear Processing of Multimodal Neural Recordings A major goal of neuroscience is to record the activity of all neurons in an area of an intact brain and understand the relationship between neural activity and behavior. However, with current technologies, it is not feasible to have a direct and simultaneous access to every neuron in a three-dimensional brain area.

Synthetic imager to record cortical neural activity over whole cranium in freely-behaving animals Understanding information flow across different brain regions during animal behavior is a key step to decipher how the brain works. It requires recording neural activities over a large neuronal population simultaneously, while maintaining a high spatiotemporal resolution. While fMRI can provide whole brain activity maps, it lacks both spatial and temporal resolutions. Conventional optical methods suffer from a tradeoff between the field of view and spatial resolution.