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Neuroscientist studying memory, decision-making, and neural coordination

  I am a neuroscientist specializing in the population dynamics of neural circuits involved in learning, memory, and decision making. Currently I am a postdoctoral fellow at NYU’s Center for Neural Science working with Dr. André Fenton. My research seeks to understand how the brain orchestrates information across distinct brain regions to support complex behaviors. I believe that the next frontier of neuroscience lies in defining the mechanistic rules of neural interoperability: how different brain regions exchange and coordinate stored information during decision making. How does the brain prioritize certain types of information over others? And how do different brain areas, which specialize in different functions, work together to problem-solve? Answering these questions is necessary for understanding how the brain works in general, but is also a prerequisite for ameliorating brain disorders that affect cognition (such as dementia, schizophrenia, and ADHD).

  My prior research first sought to explain how new information was integrated into the brain. We explored how neurons in the hippocampus related to memory changed their activity patterns by recording activity before, during, and after a novel experience (Blair et al. eLife 2023; Guo, Blair et al. Sci. Adv. 2023). This found that changes in neural activity were correlated with encoding of the experience, and by blocking specific neural transmitters we could prevent both the memory formation and the concurrent activity change. This is useful for understanding the complex interactions between neurotransmitters and memory, and potentially informing mechanisms of age- or dementia-related memory loss.

  Now during my postdoctoral research I seek to understand how changes of neural activity in one brain region may be reflected in other regions. For example, while neural activity patterns changed in the hippocampus, are these changes also reflected in other brain regions? The brain is composed of many different regions with specialized functions, yet we know very little about how they coordinate information between one another. To address this gap in understanding, I record from two brain regions while rats learn a complex navigation task. These brain regions are both involved in memory and decision-making in both rats and humans, and deficits in neural coordination are hallmarks of many brain disorders. Thus, knowing how these regions coordinate can shed light on general principles governing neural coordination, eventually informing treatments for mental health diseases affecting cognition.