Research Interests
Our research aims to understand the structure and function of the brain. To do so, we take a comparative approach and engineer molecular, viral, and sequencing technologies to measure neuronal connectivity networks and gene expression at scale in disease models and a wide range of vertebrates. We developed the first barcode sequencing-based approaches to map neuronal connectivity, increasing throughput of single-neuron mapping by orders of magnitude and opening the door to single-cell comparative connectomics. We complement these barcoding approaches by in situ sequencing of barcodes and genes. Leveraging these technologies, we ask questions including: How do new brain regions and connections evolve to support new computations? What are the organizing principles and fundamental circuit motifs of the vertebrate brain? And how do drugs of abuse and neurodevelopmental disorders break these principles? Our work is highly interdisciplinary, residing at the interface of molecular engineering, neuroscience, synthetic and evolutionary biology, genomics, virology, and computational biology.
Titles
- Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering
- Assistant Professor, Neuroscience
- Assistant Professor, Functional Anatomy & Evolution
Education
- Post-doctoral fellowship, Neuroscience, Stanford University, 2017-2020
- PhD, Neuroscience, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 2017
- MSci, Systems Biology, University of Cambridge, 2011
- BA, Natural Sciences, University of Cambridge, 2011
Recent Highlights
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February 22, 2024The Sloan Fellowship honors exceptional researchers whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders.
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September 29, 2023The BRAIN CONNECTS program supports 11 projects that aim to develop technologies to comprehensively map neural connections in both humans and laboratory animals.
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October 19, 2022For this trailblazing research, Justus Kebschull has been named a recipient of a 2022 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, which supports innovative and unconventional lines of research by early-career scientists.