The Reimer Lab focuses on understanding rapid brain-state-dependent changes in neural circuit dynamics and sensory processing using imaging and electrophysiology. Dr. Reimer did his graduate work at the University of Chicago with Dr. Nicho Hatsopoulos studying motor control in behaving primates. As a postdoc with Andreas Tolias at Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Reimer was the first to show that fluctuations in pupil size track brain state changes in the mouse, opening the possibility of using the mouse as a model to study these effects. Pupil monitoring of head-fixed mice has since been widely adopted in the field and the relationship between pupil and brain state has been replicated by dozens of studies. Dr. Reimer also lead the functional calcium imaging effort and served as project manager for the BCM-led IARPA MICrONS project performer team, recording millions of neuron-hours from almost 100,000 cortical neurons per mouse, and helped to coordinate the efforts of an international team of 40+ scientists at multiple institutions. Recent work in the Reimer lab has focused on analysis of this structure/function volume, and on understanding the roles of the neuromodulators acetylcholine and norepinephrine in shaping cellular and circuit activity during sensory perception.
The Columbia/AFRL Center of Excellence on the Neuroscience of Decision Making (Neuro-COE) represents a multidisciplinary, multimodal, and multiscale effort for elucidating the neural mechanisms of decision-making, especially under stress, time pressure, and fatigue. It represents a collaboration between biomedical engineers, neuroscientists, computer scientists and psychologists, both at Columbia University and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Join the Directors Paul Sajda and Qi Wang as we hear from experts in the field and learn from their insights.
Lecture Abstract
Information processing in the brain varies between brain states like sleep and wakefulness, and also more subtly across levels of alertness and different disease states. In order to study these dynamic changes in cortical circuits, it is important to understand their effects both at the level of large neural populations, and at the level of subthreshold voltage dynamics experienced by individual neurons. We would also like to understand the factors controlling these rapid changes in neural dynamics, which include neuromodulators such as acetylcholine and norepinephrine. A variety of multi-photon microscopy techniques and new optical sensors for calcium, voltage, and neurotransmitters offer unprecedented opportunities to address questions about the mechanisms underlying rapid brain state changes in animal models. I will describe the use of these techniques in the context of recent work in our lab focused on understanding the spatial and temporal scale of brain state changes mediated by fluctuating levels of acetylcholine and norepinephrine in the cortex.
