Multiphoton Optogenetic Silencing of Groups of Neurons In Vivo

Ian Antón Oldenburg is a Simons Collaboration Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Hillel Adesnik at the University of California, Berkeley. After his undergraduate work at Carnegie Mellon University, he got his PhD at Harvard University, where he worked with Bernardo Sabatini and used optogenetic activation to study the interactions between the basal ganglia and cortex. In general, he is interested in understanding how neurons interact with each other to change behavior. However, these interactions can be diverse, depending heavily on the state of the animal and the neurons' identities. In his current research, he is developing and implementing new multiphoton optogenetic technology that allows for the specific perturbation of many individual neurons in order to dissect these interactions at a previously intractable scale, with the goal of understanding the mechanisms behind sensory perception.