Our Research

Our lab is interested in understanding how ion channels control neural coding and behavior. Throughout the nervous system, neural inputs and outputs are shaped, tuned and integrated by highly diversified sets of ion channels. Remarkably, how single-cell biophysics, determined by ion channels, control neural coding and how these codes translate into accurate behavior remain central mysteries of neural processing. Many of the advances in addressing these questions have come from work in sensory systems, where researchers have illuminated how sensory stimuli are coded in the cortex and identified as a particular sound, sight or smell. The complexity inherent to more cognitive processes however, has made deducing the neural codes and computations underlying psychological phenomena, such as thought or recollection, a daunting prospect. It is our goal to shed new light on this topic and extract general coding principles of high-order cortical circuits. To achieve this goal, we take advantage of the simplicity of spatial coding by non-sensory medial entorhinal cortex neurons and the discovery of an ion channel that directly maps to specific features of functionally-defined medial entorhinal neurons. Our previous work demonstrated that spatially selective medial entorhinal neurons use ion channel kinetics for spatial scaling, giving my lab unprecedented access to a system ideal for studying the connections between ion channel substrates, coding and behavior. By using an interdisciplinary approach, we hope to reveal the fundamental coding algorithms of a high-order cortical region crucial for spatial coding and elucidate how these computational codes impact the cognitive process of self-localization.