Distributed neural circuitry for active sensing and resilience to disorder

  • Perception in motion

    Exploring the world often starts with moving your eyes and ears. We study how mice can find the location of sounds -- not by passively listening, but by actively moving their head and body through the world. We use machine learning to track the detailed posture in video and to identify the behavioral strategies. Neurodegenerative disease changes these strategies, and we'd like to understand how.

  • Distributed sensorimotor processing

    The brain engages with the world through perception and action, controlled by dedicated sensory and motor regions. During active perception, these regions must work together to guide motor actions toward interesting sights and sounds. We monitor and manipulate large populations of neurons to understand how they compute to control the body.

  • Learning and resilience

    Sensorimotor learning is a lifelong process. As we grow and age, our bodies change, and so the way we use them must change too. We aim to reveal how mice learn sensorimotor strategies to overcome and thrive with sensory impairments like hearing loss, motor impairments like Parkinson's disease, and the cognitive changes of Alzheimer's or autism.

Perception in action

This is a 15 minute presentation I gave for the Simons-Emory International Consortium on Motor Control in May of 2021. During this video, I review some of my previously published work, and present for the very first time some preliminary data on my future directions in active strategies for hearing.

Thank you to Dr. Alice Mosberger and the rest of the “Motor Club” organizers for giving me this opportunity to speak!

Large-scale neural activity; fine-scale behavioral monitoring

This is a published example of some of the techniques we use. Here, a mouse identified objects of different shape. We precisely track the movement of the whiskers and, simultaneously, the responses of populations of neurons.

Some of our first goals in the PAC lab are to extend these techniques to auditory behaviors, and to work with larger, more distributed neural populations.

Our thoughts, memories, decisions, and experiences all exist as structured patterns of neural activity, and the great goal of systems neuroscience is to understand how this could possibly work.