About me

I started my neuroscience career by studying ion channels on retinal ganglion cells (with Dr. William Baldridge at Dalhousie University) and later did circuit mapping on cortical slices (with Dr. Gordon Shepherd jr. at Northwestern University). However, I am most interested in examining how single neurons integrate (or compute) synaptic inputs under in vivo conditions. Through recording synaptic potentials in vivo, I hope to understand the transduction and transformation of neural signals in the neural circuits. For my Ph.D. (with Dr. David Ferster at Northwestern University), I developed dual whole-cell patch-clamp recordings in the cat visual cortex, which allowed me to observe synchronous high-frequency membrane-potential fluctuations in pairs of neurons in vivo. I also came up with an in vivo configuration where I stimulated a single simple cell while recording the membrane potential of a complex cell to test their connectivity. During my postdoc (with Dr. Karel Svoboda at Janelia Research Campus), I applied in vivo whole-cell recordings in head-fixed, task-performing mice, which led me to discovered reafference-driven inhibition in the barrel cortex during active tactile sensing and a feedforward mechanism for sensory gating. To understand the roles of diverse types of GABAergic inhibitory interneurons, I went on to record three major types of interneurons across layers of the barrel cortex in behaving mice and revealed their specific temporal dynamics in behavior. In 2019, I joined the School of Life Sciences, IDG/McGovern Institute of Brain Research, and Center for Life Sciences at Peking University. Using a simple reaction time task (thanks to the help of Dr. Mark Laubach at American University), our lab is currently investigating the neural basis of cognitive control and movement. Since then, I have started to record neural ensembles chronically in freely moving rats. My goal is to figure out how the prefrontal cortex exerts top-down control of the brain's motor centers.