Episodic memory provides a means by which we are able to reflect on the past, make decisions about the future, and form a learned identity. Even subtle changes to our memory can have a detrimental impact on our daily lives. Memory declines as we age, and clinically salient impairment is...
In the adult hippocampus of many mammalian species, populations of newborn dentate granule cells (DGCs) are continuously generated and undergo subsequent activity-dependent neuronal maturation and incorporation into the preexisting hippocampal circuitry. Increasing evidence has demonstrated that these young adult-born DGCs (abDGCs) participate in numerous cognitive and affective processes such as...
My research at northwestern with Dr. Christina Zelano focused on the human amygdala subnucleithat receive monosynaptic input from the olfactory bulb. Surprisingly little is known
about these brain regions, including their potential roles in olfactory and nonolfactory
processing. During my PhD, I completed three projects aimed at furthering our understanding...
Social engagement, or shared attention between a child and caregiver, is a critical process for language and social development. Although previous EEG studies have investigated child social processing in closely controlled, experimental studies, no study has examined the interactive, reciprocal process of naturalistic social engagement. In my first paper, we...
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder, causing devastating disabilities in both motor and non-motor domains following the degeneration of dopamine (DA) producing neurons of the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc). Current treatments are highly limited in efficacy, and no established treatments currently exist to alter disease...
Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common aggressive primary malignant brain tumorin adults with a median age of onset of 65 years of age. Although advanced age is often associated with worse GBM patient survival, the predominant source(s) of maladaptive aging
effects remains to be established. Here we studied intra-tumoral and...
Stroke is the leading cause of permanent adult disability. Subcortical unilateral (hemiparetic) stroke affecting the internal capsule or basal ganglia is the most common of all strokes and usually results in hemiparesis of the contralateral arm and leg. About 80% of the individuals with a moderate to severe hemiparetic stroke...
Hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels are non-selective cation channels expressed in the brain and heart where they exert control over many diverse physiological properties. In the hippocampus, HCN channels are enriched in a dendritic gradient within CA1 pyramidal cells where they reduce dendritic integration and dampen neuronal excitability. HCN channels...
Decision making is an essential and indispensable element in everyday life. It is posited that parallel, distinct systems subserving deliberative, goal-directed control and automatic, habitual control underlie decision making. Computational accounts suggest that model-based and model-free learning strategies give rise to these two systems respectively. The model-based system is a...
For years, neuroscientists have strived to understand memory consolidation, where salient memories are sorted and organized into distributed cortical networks for long-term storage. A large body of sleep research suggests that slow-wave sleep is an optimal opportunity for memory consolidation, and that consolidation is driven, at least in part, by...
Leptin, a peptide mainly secreted in proportion to adipose tissue mass, increases energy expenditure with a parallel increase in breathing. The existence of a leptin-mediated neural circuit linking breathing to metabolism has been speculated, yet the precise central mechanisms were unknown. In my thesis, I show that optogenetic activation of...
Electrical spinal cord stimulation is an emerging treatment for spinal cord injury that can improve walking and bladder control, among many other functions. While the anatomical location of the motor pools for muscles involved in locomotion in the lumbosacral cord has been identified, the map of the functional output of...
Dynamic decision-making is a complex process that relies on our ability to generate, evaluate and implement a variety of strategies. Understanding how people navigate this process is a difficult problem that requires a wide range of methodologies. This study details a combination of behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and neuroimaging that...
Genetic studies have found variants in the protein-degrading autophagy-lysosomal pathway (ALP) to be among the most common risk factors for developing Parkinson’s disease (PD). Macroautophagy (MA) is the arm of this pathway which delivers cytosolic components to lysosomes for degradation and is essential for neuronal health. The defining pathological protein...
The current view in neuroscience holds that the brain, together with its sensory and motor structures and the environment, form a closed-loop system – a sensorimotor loop – in which the brain receives information from the environment and converts it into a motor response while simultaneously making predictions about future...
Anxiety and depression are highly prevalent, recurrent, and major public health problems. Decades of research has uncovered associations between symptom dimensions of anxiety and depression and abnormal neural activation across executive control-, threat-, and reward-related networks. Recent studies have developed a hierarchical symptom structure of anxiety and depression termed the...
This thesis focuses on the development of a cochlear implant (CI) that uses photons to stimulate surviving auditory neurons in severe-to-profoundly deaf individuals. The benefit of optical over electrical stimulation is its spatial selectivity with the potential to create significantly more independent channels to encode acoustic information and likely enhances...
Each neuron in the primary motor cortex (M1) is like a musician in an orchestra, contributing to a larger harmony under the constraint of a “neural manifold”—a geometric score describing the correlated signals produced by the neural musicians that drive movement. Despite the widespread recognition of the importance of M1...
Chronic stress is a significant risk factor for the development of numerous psychiatric disorders, including major depressive disorder (MDD). Individuals with MDD exhibit impairments in reward processing and decreased motivation to engage in previously-rewarding activities. Importantly, there is a large sex disparity in MDD diagnosis, such that it affects nearly...
Movement and sensing fundamentally works in a synergistic manner. Animal's sensory organs --- be they independently movable like eyes or requiring whole body movement as in the case of electroreceptors --- are actively manipulated throughout stimulus-driven active sensing behaviors. Though these sensing-related motions have been individually reported and analyzed across...