Neural circuits that help us find our way home - and how they are impaired in neurological & psychiatric disorders

Charles Darwin used the term “dead reckoning” to describe the mysterious ability of most species to seamlessly navigate back home, even in the absence of external guiding cues. Finding our way home is indeed something most of us take for granted, but this facility is dramatically impaired in many people with Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and epilepsy. Our research is motivated by a desire to understand how healthy neurons in the brain compute the way home and how these same neuronal computations fail in neurological and psychiatric disorders, with the ultimate goal of therapeutically repairing these neurons and computations.

Rational rules for the use of psychedelic medicine, including the custom engineering of multiple new mouse lines

Psychedelic medicine makes many assumptions about what neurons and brain regions are tarteged by psychedelic drugs, as well as how neurons are supposedly altered. We work to causally validate or debunk these assumptions using systematic physiology, pharmacology, AI-driven data assimilation, and behavioral analyses. A rigorous experimental understanding together with computational rigor is necessary to identify the utility and limits of psychedelic medicine. To enable this, we have also engineered multiple new mouse lines and look forward to sharing these so that we can collaboratively decipher how psychedelic drugs impact healthy and neuropsychiatric circuits.

Read on for our papers, and please get in touch with Omar if you have questions about our research, want to support our work, or if you’re interested in joining or collaborating with the lab.

New Manuscripts from the Lab: