INVITATION
to a TALK by
Alipasha Vaziri
Prof., Ph.D.
Laboratory of Neurotechnology and Biophysics
The Rockefeller University, New York
Towards cortex-wide cellular resolution functional maps of neuronal circuits in the mammalian brain
Thursday, July 9th 2026, 10:00 h
Location: Ludwig-Boltzmann Lecture Hall, 1st floor, Boltzmanngasse 5
Hosted by: Markus Arndt
Abstract:
Understanding how neuronal computation is implemented in the mammalian brain requires both brain-wide anatomical and functional maps at cellular to synaptic resolution. While first whole-brain connectomes in invertebrates have recently been established, the ability to detect and manipulate brain-wide distributed functional circuits at cellular scale in mammalian systems has remained limited due to lack of suitable technologies.
Our lab has consistently pushed the limits on the speed, volume size, and depth at which neuronal population activity can be optically recorded at cellular resolution. Amongst others, we have demonstrated whole-brain recording of neuroactivity at cellular resolution in small model systems, as well as near-simultaneous recording from over one million neurons distributed across both hemispheres and cortical layers of the mouse cortex at cellular resolution. This data has provided insights into the geometry of neuronal population dynamics and has revealed an unbounded scaling of the dimensionality of neuronal population activity with neuron number up to one million neurons. Understanding the mechanisms that give rise to such dynamics could uncover the computational principles underlying neural computation in biological systems and inspire a new generation of machine intelligence.
