Hybrid Mind Meeting 7 May: Dr. Jennifer Li & and Dr. Drew Robson

A core technological challenge in neuroscience remains the inability to access most of the brain, most of the time, across most of an animal’s lifespan. To overcome this limitation, my lab develops self-driving tracking microscopes that enable brain-wide, cellular-resolution calcium imaging in freely moving larval zebrafish. Using this platform, we have uncovered the neural correlates of exploitation–exploration states during foraging, revealed novel sleep substates with distinct eye-movement kinematics, and discovered place cells for the first time in a non-amniote animal. The existence of place cell in the larval zebrafish brain suggests that abstract spatial cognitive representations can be generated by a compact neural network of only 100,000 neurons, opening the door to brain-wide mechanistic analysis of the underlying circuitry.

Building on these discoveries, my lab is now focused on 1) uncovering the neural architectures that underlie spatial cognition in the vertebrate brain through joint analysis of brain-wide activity and brain-wide synaptic connectivity in the same animal, and 2) understanding the developmental processes that expand spatial representational capacity over time. I will highlight engineering efforts to create autonomous systems with embedded intelligence that enable whole-brain recording across circadian and developmental timescales without human intervention, making it possible to directly track the emergence, stabilization, and reorganization of spatial cognitive networks within a single animal over development.