Our lab studies the neural circuits that make auditory cognition possible. Our goal is to understand how we assign meaning to sounds, how we attend to sounds or ignore them, how we remember them, and how disorders of the brain can affect these processes. Of particular interest is understanding behavioral flexibility, a process that allows our responses to sounds to can change depending on context.

Behaving appropriately after changes in context requires that organisms rapidly modify their expectations, associations between cues and rewards, or attentional state. In our experiments, we use techniques such as optogenetics, electrophysiology, and two-photon imaging, to monitor and manipulate neuronal activity of specific cell types in behaving mice, together with theoretical and computational approaches, to uncover the mechanisms that underlie these flexible behaviors.