Anderson Lab
Principal Investigator: David J Anderson
Institution: California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, CA)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: Inquire for rotation/fellowship opportunities
Research Focus
Project Summary/Abstract This proposal responds to NOFO PA-25-301 and NOSI NOT-MH-25-045, which “encourages computational approaches in fundamental neuroscience research investigating the molecular and cellular mechanisms that drive the structure and function of cells and circuits supporting cognitive, affective, and social domains.” It focuses on developing and applying genetically based tools for accessing and analyzing neurons that contribute to emergent properties of neural networks, such as attractors, that we have recently discovered to encode scalable and persistent internal affective states underlying instinctive social behaviors. We wish to adapt technologies originally developed to genetically access neuronal subpopulations defined by stable molecular markers, to access computationally defined neuronal subpopulations with specific dynamical properties. We propose to combine computational tools to identify such subpopulations in large-scale neural data, with new methods to mark, map and manipulate their constituent neurons with high spatio-temporal resolution, to understand the neural implementation and causal role in behavior of these emergent network-level mechanisms. Ou…
Active NIH Awards
- 2R01MH070053-21: Region-Specific, Inducible Axonal Tract-Tracing in the Brain (2026)
- 5R37DA031389-15: Imaging neuromodulation in the brain (2026)
- 5R01NS123916-05: Circuit basis of social behavior decision-making in a subcortical network (2025)
- 5R37DA031389-14: Imaging neuromodulation in the brain (2025)
- 5R01MH123612-05: Multimodal, integrated analysis of neural activity and naturalistic social behavior in freely moving mice (2024)
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