I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience, and my work focuses on the encoding of information by populations of cerebellar neurons, how they contribute to healthy behavior, and how they are disrupted in disease states. While the cerebellum is classically considered a motor control structure, it has ever-emerging roles in extra motor behaviors and neurological disorders. In the case of epilepsy, cerebellar dysfunction could have major implications for patients, as cerebellar alterations predict comorbidities and negative outcomes in patients with epilepsy. A major challenge in cerebellar physiology is that while the cerebellar cortex has a highly conserved, stereotypic cytoarchitecture, with a precise spatial organization of inputs and outputs, we lack a clear understanding of how this spatial organization relates to the specific computations performed by cerebellar neurons. My laboratory utilizes wide-field optical imaging and intersectional approaches for circuit dissection in rodents to characterize cerebellar dynamics at the network level. We are examining how functional networks of cerebellar neurons are engaged during healthy behaviors, such as reaching or locomotion, but also how they are disrupted in disease states like epilepsy. Our ultimate goal is to link the structural composition of the cerebellar cortex with its functional organization and underlying fundamental computations.
