Sloan Research Fellowship - Mouse Motor Control

Mammals are distinguished by the exceptional diversity and agility of their limb movement, qualities which are critical to the evolutionary fitness of many pecies1,2. While brain regions important for mammalian limb control have been identified, the neural signal processing that ultimately governs motor commands sent to muscles has remained stubbornly opaque. Understanding this processing requires that we observe activity in relevant neuronal populations and the responses it evokes on the millisecond timescale over which movement unfolds3. My work melds emerging genetic, physiological, and computational methods to achieve this.