Throughout my career, a central direction of my research has been to understand how interactions between multiple brain regions give rise to behavior. To this end, I have been pursuing research using olfactory perception and memory as model behaviors, and investigating cellular and circuit mechanisms that support such behaviors. I have a broad background in functional optical imaging, high-density electrophysiology from rodents under different behaviors, and single-cell neuroanatomy, with extensive training in spike and local field potential (LFP) analyses.
My PhD work in the Kensaku Mori lab at the University of Tokyo and postdoc research in the laboratory of Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology revealed fundamental circuit mechanisms and architectures that underlie sensory perception and memory (see selected publication list below). In my own laboratory at the University of California, Irvine, I am extending these approaches to study (i) cellular and circuit mechanisms for sensory perception and memory in healthy subjects and (ii) how impairment of such mechanisms causes memory deficit using Alzheimer’s disease models.