Abstract: It has long been established that when an animal is given choice between a caloric sugar (sucrose) and a non-caloric sweetener (sucralose) that the animal will prefer sucrose over sucralose. Furthermore, this preference is independent of the sweet taste in the mouth. In the intestinal epithelium there is a special type of sensory cell called neuropod cells. These specialized cells transduce nutrients to communicate directly and rapidly via synapses with vagal neurons. My team recently discovered that neuropod cells of the small intestine differentially sense sucrose and sucralose to drive feeding behavior.

Bio: Maya is a sensory neurobiologist. In 2015, she was awarded a PhD from Yale University in Cellular and Molecular Physiology. At Yale, Maya studied the how individual neurons of the vagus nerve respond to inflammation. Though the vagus has been of interest for centuries, only in recent years have the tools emerged to study single cells. Maya was one of the first trainees to use transcriptomics to study specific populations vagal neurons. These experiences were a platform for Maya to uncover a novel sensory neural circuit during her postdoc. After completing her Ph.D., Maya joined the laboratory of Dr. Diego Bohorquez at Duke University. She focused her expertise on uncovering how the gut communicates sensory signals from nutrients to the brain. In 2018, Maya was the leading author on an article in Science showing the neural basis of a new sense - a gut sense. This work has opened a new field of exploration in sensory neurobiology. One to explore how nutrients affect emotions and behavior through dedicated neural circuits. Maya’s research seeks to uncover the secrets of how the gut and brain talk in real time.

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How do cognition and behavior emerge from the collective activity of large networks of neurons in our brain? Can we simulate these neural circuits in silico to build artificial neural networks that share our complex cognitive abilities? Leveraging a vast network of collaborations with experimental colleagues, our lab aims to explain the neural underpinnings of natural and artificial intelligence, with the belief that we can only understand cognitive function once we can build it from the bottom up in biologically plausible neural network models. We study how our cognitive abilities change depending on context, our mental state, and varying levels of neuromodulators (such as serotonin). This contextual modulation occurs for example when we make more mistakes while distracted, or perform really well while attentive. We design brain-machine interfaces to read and write neural activity in real time with the long-term goal of rescuing cognitive deficits for therapeutic interventions in the human brain.

• What neural mechanisms underlie the temporal organization of behavior?
• How does the nervous system generate flexible behavior to survive in dynamics environments?
• Can we alter behavior through manipulations of neural circuits as a way to ameliorate cognitive dysfunction?

We blend methods from physics, machine learning, and dynamical systems, to build models of behavior, cognition and brain activity.

Predictive coding is a theory of brain function that assumes the brain contains an internal model of the world, which constantly generates predictions about our environment, and updates the predictions if they deviate from the actual external inputs. Impaired predictive processing is suggested to underlie symptoms such as hallucinations and social disconnection in neurological disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. Treating these disorders requires understanding the neural mechanisms that generate and update prediction signals in the healthy brain. My long-term vision is to shed light on the circuits and computations that underlie predictive processing in the brain.

I will start my talk by presenting data from my previous and ongoing research that demonstrate predictive signals in cortical and cerebellar circuits in behaving mice. Then I will describe the gap in our knowledge about how the cerebellum and cortex may interact to support predictive behavior. Finally, I will present the future research plans for my lab to investigate these unknown questions, shedding light on the cortico-cerebellar circuitries that underlie predictive processing.

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Paper - TBA

Natural visual processing entails a complex interplay between sensory input, behavioral context, and on-going brain dynamics. Our lab seeks to understand how these processes give rise to goal-directed visual behaviors, using the mouse as a model system. As a complement to studying visual processing in trained tasks, we are now exploring the neural circuits mediating ethologically relevant behaviors that laboratory mice perform. In particular, our studies of prey capture have provided insight into behavioral strategies and neural circuits for detection of salient stimuli within a complex and dynamic sensory environment. We are also implementing novel experimental approaches to investigate neural coding of the visual scene as animals freely move through their environment and engage in natural behaviors. Finally, I will present a new research direction studying the completely different, yet largely unexplored, visual system of the octopus.

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