We welcome our next speaker, Dr. Alex Kwan from Yale University School of Medicine. He is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and of Neuroscience.

Optical Probing of Brain Functions: From Decision-making to Drug Actions

Abstract: My lab is broadly interested in the function of the frontal cortex. Many of our experiments involve cellular-resolution optical imaging and head-fixed mouse behavior. The talk will be divided into two halves to match the lab’s two major focuses.

In the first half, I will describe efforts to understand the brain circuitry supporting flexible decision-making. In a dynamic environment, animals must adjust their action plans to match the behavioral demands. To study how the brain supports flexible behavior, my lab has adapted classic reward learning tasks for the head-fixed mouse. Using lesion, optogenetics, and computational modeling, we are delineating how the frontal cortex may contribute to the neural implementation of reinforcement learning.

In the second half, I will talk about the lab’s interest in determining how the brain responds to drugs. Specifically, compounds such as ketamine can produce fast-acting antidepressant actions, yet the neurobiological underpinning remains unclear. I will describe a series of studies in which we used subcellular-resolution optical imaging to visualize the effects of ketamine on the structure and function of dendrites in the frontal cortex of mice.

Bio: Alex received a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Physics from Simon Fraser University and a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Cornell University. At Cornell, he developed nonlinear optical microscopes in the laboratory of Watt Webb. In 2009, he went to the University of California, Berkeley to work in the laboratory of Yang Dan, where he studied cortical microcircuits. He joined the Yale School of Medicine faculty in 2013.