Research Interests
Austin Graves’ lab seeks to understand how the brain represents learning and memory as functional changes within complex networks of synapses and neurons. They employ a wide variety of approaches from systems neuroscience, neuroengineering, molecular biology, and computational data science to image and record neural activity in behaving rodents. They seek to elucidate neurophysiological encoding of behavior, and observe how these processes are disrupted by pharmacological agents and neurological disease
Ongoing projects in the lab include:
Neuroscience/Neuroengineering
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Using Neuropixels probes to study how memory is encoded across the entire brain
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Employing brain-wide electrophysiology to explore psychedelic experience as a treatment for depression
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Imaging and tracking millions of individual synapses in behaving mice
Computational
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Decoding how firing, connectivity, and synchrony of circuits comprised of thousands of individual neurons control behavior
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Training AI and machine-learning algorithms to super-resolve synapses and fine neuronal processes in vivo
Disease models
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Whole-brain electrophysiology and imaging during onset and treatment of depression and anxiety
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Longitudinal in vivo imaging of synaptic pathologies of Alzheimer’s disease
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Exploring how exposure to heavy metals affects cognition and neural activity
We are actively recruiting rotation students to make high-channel-count recordings in behaving rodents using next-generation Neuropixels probes.
Titles
- Assistant Research Professor, Biomedical Engineering
Affiliated Centers & Institutes
Education
- PhD, Neuroscience, Northwestern, 2012