JY gave a talk at CNeuro2026's one-day workshop and pointed to a brain region that the lab wants to record from, model, and understand.

We were grateful to host Prof. Henry Yin from Duke University for a visit. During his visit, Henry gave two talks at PKU on dopamine and basal ganglia function. We also had the opportunity to perform Neuropixels recordings together, and he helped us identify putative dopamine neurons in the SNc. Thank you, Henry, for your generous support and guidance!

Our cross-day neuron-tracking paper is now published in Patterns (Link). This paper introduces DANT—Density-based Across-day Neuron Tracking. DANT addresses a central challenge in chronic electrophysiology: after days or even weeks, how can we identify signals from the same neuron among thousands of recorded units obtained with chronically implanted high-density probes?

We found that unsupervised clustering, combined with iterative probe-motion correction, provides an efficient and practical framework for solving this problem.

We had the great pleasure of hosting Dr. Joe Paton from the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme. We discussed our work on recording and manipulating the striatum, and engaged in fruitful conversations on learning and behavior.

Our latest publication is out in The Journal of Neuroscience (Link)!

In this study, we used a classic approach—lesion techniques—to uncover distinct behavioral consequences of damaging the motor cortex versus the dorsolateral striatum in rats performing a simple reaction time task. Notably, we found that striatum-lesioned rats developed permanent deficits in waiting, highlighting the striatum’s crucial role in balancing waiting and responding during reaction time behavior.

This publication is our first paper in this field—and there are more to come!

We were thrilled to have Dr. David Robbe from The Institute of Mediterranean Neurobiology (INMED) visit us! He gave an inspiring talk about the striatum and its role in controlling effort. We also had a great time discussing topics like the striatum, animal behavior, and interval timing. David shared valuable insights and provided helpful feedback on our projects.

Karel visits the lab.

We attended the first Chang Hsiang-Tong Brain Science Symposium held in Shanghai. We presented our work on striatal opto-manipulation, secondary motor cortex perturbation, motor cortex coding and stability, and the effect of mPFC inactivation/lesion on learning reaction time behavior. Hanbo received a poster prize for his work on mPFC and learning.

 We presented our research on the role of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in learning a reaction time task at the 8th Computational Properties of Prefrontal Cortex Workshop in Bethesda. Our presentation garnered important feedback from leading scientists in the field of reaction time behaviors.

We presented two posters at the XIV Meeting of the International Basal Ganglia Society (IBAGS) in Stockholm, one based on lesion experiments and the other on optogenetic experiments. This was the first time our lab presented its work at an international conference.