Mark Schnitzer Abstract

Mark J. Schnitzer
Stanford University

"Of mice, men, and microscopes: Watching brain dynamics at the cellular scale in behaving subjects."

ABSTRACT:

A long standing challenge in brain science is to understand how populations of individual neurons and glia contribute to animal behavior and brain disease. Addressing this challenge has been difficult partly due to lack of appropriate imaging technology for visualizing cellular properties in awake behaving animals and over long time periods, I will describe one- and two- photon optical approaches to studying cellular dynamics in the brains of actively behaving mice. Using these approaches we have probed neural coding schemes involved in motor control and spatial navigation. We have also been applying minimally invasive imaging techniques in human subjects for studies of motor control at the cellular scale.