Karl Deisseroth is the D.H. Chen Professor of Bioengineering and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received his AB from Harvard University, his PhD from Stanford, and his MD from Stanford. His lab at Stanford is interested both in natural behaviorally-relevant neural circuit dynamics, and in pathological dynamics underlying neuropsychiatric disease symptomatology and treatment.

Shuo Chen is a postdoctoral researcher at RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan. He is also a visiting postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his BS in chemical engineering from Tsinghua University and his PhD in organic and supramolecular chemistry from The University of Tokyo, working on the design, synthesis, and characterization of voltage-sensing molecular assemblies. Chen’s strong interest in neuroscience led him to embark on a journey in neuroscience as a postdoc. Since then, he has been working on memory-related hippocampal neural circuits. He is also interested in developing chemical tools for applications in neuroscience.

Ana Domingos is an associate professor of neuroscience in the department of physiology, anatomy, and genetics, at Oxford University. Her lab researches neuroimmune mechanisms underlying obesity. Her lab discovered the neuro-adipose junction, a functional synapse-like connection between white adipocytes and the sympathetic nervous system necessary and sufficient for fat mass reduction, via norepinephrine (NE) signaling (Cell 2015, Nature Comm 2017). They then discovered Sympathetic neuron-Associated Macrophages (SAMs) that contribute to obesity by directly importing and metabolizing NE (Nature Medicine, 2017). Previously, she started up her own lab at the Gulbenkian Science Institute. As an undergraduate, Domingos studied mathematics at the University of Lisbon and Paris Diderot University. She has a PhD in neurobiology from The Rockefeller University, where she was advised by Leslie Vosshall. Domingos did her postdoc with Jeffrey Friedman at The Rockefeller University.

Ally Girasole is a neuroscience PhD student at the University of California, San Francisco in Alexandra Nelson's lab, where she studies the cellular and microcircuit mechanisms of levodopa-induced dyskinesia. She previously worked with Zayd Khaliq at NIH, studying midbrain dopamine neurons and their presynaptic connections. Girasole earned her BS in biology at Ithaca College.

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.

Linlin Fan is a PhD student in the laboratory of Adam Cohen at Harvard University. Her research interests lie in developing molecular, genetic, and optical tools to study how brain processes information and what goes wrong in diseases. She developed all-optical electrophysiology of synaptic function and applied the technique to study how ketamine induced hyperactivity. Fan obtained her BS from Peking University.