I am thrilled to share several successes we had this year. We began collecting data for three projects in which we are studying the organization and function of an enigmatic brain area that is critical for perceiving the shape of visual objects. In these projects, we are using new optogenetic techniques in non-human primates to excite and silence cortical activity with light. Getting this technique to work in non-human primates has been a major technical challenge in the field, and one that we have now overcome successfully in the laboratory. Hearing the vigorous responses of neurons activated by light was completely exhilarating for me—an achievement more than three years in the making. With these new data in hand, we are beginning to uncover the detailed cellular and circuit mechanisms by which the cerebral cortex supports our perception of visual objects.

With our new data in hand, we are excited to dig deeper into data analyses that will enable us to glean new mechanistic insights into how the cerebral cortex supports visual perception. Because our experiments are yielding datasets that have never been collected in non-human primates before we are benefiting tremendously from scientific conversations with other colleagues at the Grossman Center. These conversations have been critical for guiding the analyses of our first datasets and for informing our subsequent experimental directions.

Funding from the Grossman Center is supporting an entirely new class of experiments in non-human primates. These optogenetic experiments are enabling us to decipher how specific areas and cell types within the primate brain give rise to perception. Importantly, these experiments will serve as a blueprint for future mechanistic studies of primate cognition and behavior.

Over the past year, I have been fortunate to add two new theory and experimental faculty members to my mentoring committee: Dr. Mark Churchland and Dr. Ken Miller. These faculty mentors are already making a tangible impact on my budding research program, and are encouraging me to expand our work in new directions. Mark Churchland’s work has inspired me to start looking beyond the responses of single cortical neurons and begin thinking about how populations of cortical neurons work jointly to support visual perception. And we are now using some of Mark’s experimental techniques (multi-contact laminar probe recordings) to study the primate visual cortex in new ways. Ken Miller’s work is inspiring me to think about how the optogenetic data we are collecting might inform new theoretical models for neural circuit computations. I have also recently received helpful guidance from Dr. Larry Abbott in advance of an interview for a private foundation Scholar Award, which I ultimately won. His advice was pivotal in helping me pitch my current research directions in a more compelling and impactful way. The guidance of all of these faculty mentors (in addition to others) continues to be critical for enriching our current research directions and evolving the next generation of experiments in the lab.

I remain immensely grateful for Dr. Sanford Grossman’s and Dr. Naava Grossman’s generosity and foresight in supporting neuroscience experiments in non-human primates. These experiments are technically challenging, but the datasets we are actively collecting will doubtless advance a deeper understanding of human brain and behavior, both in states of health and disease. Being a Grossman-Kavli Scholar has given me the opportunity to build stronger ties with the world-class theory community at Columbia, which in turn makes our experimental work more robust and exciting. Three years into this funding period, and despite the pandemic, I’m very thrilled that the lab is now fully operational: we have two experimental rigs for studying primate behavior and neurophysiology and performing laser-based optogenetic experiments, in addition to our own little virology facility for developing and producing viral vectors for our optogenetic experiments. And now that this infrastructure is all in place and the data are rolling in, we invite the Grossmans to visit us someday!