Event:

A core technological challenge in neuroscience remains the inability to access most of the brain, most of the time, across most of an animal’s lifespan. To overcome this limitation, my lab develops behavior-aware autonomous tracking microscopes that enable brain-wide, cellular-resolution calcium imaging in freely moving larval zebrafish. Using this platform, we have uncovered previously unknown neuromodulatory states and spatial cognitive representations. In particular, the recent discovery of a distributed network of spatial cells, including place cells and boundary vector cells, establishes zebrafish as a powerful minimal vertebrate model for studying spatial cognitive representations.
Building on these discoveries, my lab is now focused on uncovering the neural mechanisms that give rise to and maintain spatial representations across behavioral states. To this end, we are investigating how online activity during behavior and offline activity during sleep jointly shape spatial cognitive networks in the zebrafish brain. I will highlight the recent development of behavioral and neural imaging devices capable of continuous whole-brain recording across circadian and developmental timescales. These technological advances have enabled the discovery of novel sleep substates and their associated whole-brain dynamics, as well as direct tracking of the expansion, stabilization, and reorganization of spatial cognitive networks over development.