Visit to Kavli NDI at Johns Hopkins University

maximijn

On December 3rd I visited the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute at Johns Hopkins University for a Kavli NDI-X speaker series.

During my visit I had the chance to meet faculty members as well as postdocs and students, and I presented my work on the diversity of GABAergic interneurons in the mouse perirhinal cortex.

This is a great opportunity given to postdocs to present their work and meet with faculty members of an amazing institution. The format is indeed similar to that of regular seminar series and is a very good practice for job talks at the postdoctoral or faculty level.

Other postdoctoral seminar series exists in the US and I totally recommend applying for the chance to participate in them: SPINES at NYU, SYNAPSES at Yale, and MSN at Mount Sinai.

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SfN 2019

maximijn
I really enjoyed a busy poster session, meeting friends and colleagues interested in the diversity of interneurons in perirhinal cortex
Giulia presented her poster on the role of Cajal-Retzius cells in the development of the hippocampus
After the conference we headed to the Field Museum to introduce our son to Sue the T-Rex

Home

maximijn

Welcome to my site

I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at NTNU, Trondheim. My long-term goal in science is to unveil the contribution of different types of neurons to brain function

Brain circuits are formed by an astonishing number of different neuron types. Each type of neuron is characterized by specific morphological, physiological and molecular features that allow them to exert specific functions in different circuits. The same features allow neuroscientists to classify these neurons in discrete types, ultimately forming a coherent taxonomy of neurons.

I chose two models to address my research goals: the diversity of cortical GABAergic neurons, and multisensory integration in perirhinal cortex. GABAergic interneurons represent a minority of neurons in the mammalian cortex; however, their wide diversity allows them to participate in specific circuit designs and represent an ideal model to study the relationship between morphology and function. On the other hand, multisensory integration (i.e. the ability to merge information from different senses) is one of the most widespread and distinctive functions of the brain. The perirhinal cortex is a perfect playground to tackle my research interests: it contains a peculiar distribution of GABAergic neuron types that sets it apart from other cortical areas; moreover the perirhinal cortex receives information from all sensory modalities and has been implicated in the creation of multisensory representations of objects.

In this website you will find information about the projects I am working on, including advances, publications, and presentations at conferences. On the Blog page I will post short descriptions of interesting neuroscience articles as well as curiosities of the neuroscience world.

Left, mouse barrel cortex layer 5B thick-tufted pyramidal cell (red), and Nissl bodies stained in blue. Center, hemisphere of a GAD67-eGFP transgenic mouse expressing GFP (green) in all GABAergic interneurons, and immunostained for parvalbumin (red) and Nissl (blue). Upper right, lateral entorhinal cortex layer 3 pyramidal (red), green cells are ChR2 expressing PV cells. Lower right, Biocyting filled CCK interneuron (green) from the perirhinal cortex labeled with a viral intersectional genetic approach (red) and Nissl bodies in blue.