Guest seminar - Mapping the Brain with Light and Sound
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Understanding how emotions such as fear are represented in the brain requires tools that bridge multiple biological scales, from local circuits to distributed, brain-wide dynamics. In this talk, I will present an integrated approach that combines optical and acoustic methods to map neural activity across scales in behaving animals. Using miniature fluorescence microscopy, we record the activity of selected hypothalamic neurons in freely behaving mice and show that fear is encoded in population-level activity patterns. To extend beyond local circuits, we use functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) to capture brain-wide activity and characterize the brain as a dynamic network. By combining this with optogenetic perturbations, we map how local activity propagates through distributed circuits. Together, these approaches demonstrate how light and sound can be used to causally probe and map brain function, providing a framework for linking local activity to whole-brain dynamics.
Kathy Y.M. Cheung is a neuroscientist and bioengineer at the California Institute of Technology. She recently completed her Ph.D. in Neurobiology with Mikhail G. Shapiro and David J. Anderson. Her work integrates optical and ultrasound imaging methods to explore how emotions are generated, represented, and regulated across distributed brain-wide networks.