Postdoc Michael Yartsev will leave the lab in the summer of 2015 to start his own lab, working on bats, in the Department of Bioengineering at UC Berkeley. Congratulations to both Michael and Berkeley!

Bing, who graduated from her Ph.D. in the lab as recently as 2012, is now an Assistant Professor! She is in the Dept. of Biology and Institute for Neuroengineering at the University of Washington, Seattle.  Congratulations to both Bing and UW!

Postdoc Jeffrey Erlich becomes an alumnus of the lab, as he starts his own lab at NYU Shanghai. Congratulations to both Jeff and NYU Shanghai!

Shanghai is an exciting city, with a burgeoning neuroscience community, and great support. Interested in great neuroscience in China? Jeff is looking for students and postdocs.

Christine Constantinople, a joint postdoc in the Brody and Tank labs, started her prestigious Helen Hay Whitney Foundation postdoctoral fellowship on April 1. These are among the most prestigious postdoctoral fellowships in the life sciences, so they are extremely competitive: out of 531 applicants, Christine was one of only 24 who received the award.  Congratulations Christine!

Great news for Michael Yartsev! His Ph.D. work has earned him both SFN’s 2013 Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience and Science Magazine’s 2013 Eppendorf Prize for Neurobiology. Part of the Eppendorf prize is that the essay Michael submitted for it gets published in Science. Congratulations Michael!!!

Michael adds these prizes to his previous collection of two prizes from the International Society for Neuroethology, the 2012 Young Investigator Award and the 2102 Capranica Prize.

Ben Scott, a postdoc in the Brody and Tank labs, has developed a system for voluntary head-fixation in rats (Scott, Brody, and Tank, Neuron 2013). Based on the principles of kinematic mounts often used in optics, the system allows precise re-positioning of a rat’s head, across multiple trials of a behavior, with an accuracy of a few microns. This enables cellular-resolution calcium imaging in behaving rats. In addition, because the rats engage the system voluntarily, the approach is amenable to high-throughput training. Thanks to Ben’s work, we can now use the lab’s training facility to teach voluntarily head-fixing rats to perform complex cognitive behaviors requiring many months to train. We are using this is to perform the first cellular-resolution imaging assays of neural activity involved in higher cognitive processes.

Graduate student Ann Duan has been awarded a prestigious International Student Research Fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Only 50 or so of these fellowships are awarded each year– they are extremely competitive.

Congratulations Ann!

Christine comes from Randy Bruno‘s lab at Columbia University, where she showed that deep layer neurons can receive thalamic input directly, bypassing layer 4. Christine will be working jointly with David Tank‘s lab.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has renewed its appointment of Carlos Brody as an HHMI investigator.

The lab’s research is running full steam, and this will allow us to make even faster progress. The next 5 years are going to be amazing!

The sight of sleepless, hardworking, undergrads toiling through the night has come to an end (until next year!).
Congratulations to Rina, Jo, and Kanwal on handing in their senior theses!