Faculty

Image: Dystrophic Corticospinal Rat Neurons Following Spinal Cord Injury – Blue- Nathaniel Peters

Nicholas Steinmetz, PhD

Assistant Professor

Brain-wide neural circuits underlying vision, cognition, and action

Our goal is to understand the neural mechanisms underlying perception, cognition, and action. In particular, we study how these brain functions are distributed across diverse neural circuits, and how these distributed populations of neurons coordinate their dynamics to generate useful behaviors.

Our approach is to employ state-of-the-art methods for measuring and manipulating neural activity at large scale and high resolution, combined with sophisticated, quantifiable behavioral tasks and mechanistic modeling.

Our work specifically involves studying visually-guided behaviors in mice, using techniques such as next-generation Neuropixels electrophysiology, large-scale calcium imaging, systematic optogenetic manipulations, and advanced data analysis and modeling.

Selected Publications: