The Big Picture

I bridge the MacLean and Palmer Labs, who together apply innovative experimental and theoretical techniques in order to study multineuronal activity patterns in the brain. I am specifically interested in mouse primary cortex (V1), the entry point for visual information into cortex. V1 is one of the most carefully characterized parts of the brain, yet the response of these neurons to naturalistic visual input is still largely unexplained. I  have undertaken the task of explaining the computation(s) performed by V1 when viewing complex natural visual scenes. I am imaging circuit activity (200-300 neurons) in V1 using two-photon calcium imaging in the awake, behaving mouse viewing natural and synthetic movies.