Austin Graves, PhD

Research Interests

Austin Graves’ lab seeks to understand how the brain represents learning and memory as functional changes within complex networks of synapses and neurons. They employ a wide variety of approaches from systems neuroscience, neuroengineering, molecular biology, and computational data science to image and record neural activity in behaving rodents. They seek to elucidate neurophysiological encoding of behavior, and observe how these processes are disrupted by pharmacological agents and neurological disease

Ongoing projects in the lab include:

Neuroscience/Neuroengineering

• Imaging and tracking millions of individual synapses in behaving mice
• Exploring the role of synaptic engrams in learning and memory
• Using Neuropixels probes to study memory encoding, storage, and retrieval across the brain

Computational

• Training AI and machine-learning algorithms to super-resolve synapses and fine neuronal processes in vivo
• Decoding dense in vivo electrophysiology datasets to understand how single neurons control behavior

Disease models

• Longitudinal in vivo imaging of synaptic pathologies of Alzheimer’s disease
• Whole-brain imaging and electrophysiology during exposure to and relapse from drugs of abuse
• Exploring how exposure to heavy metals affects cognition and neural activity

Titles

• Assistant Research Professor, Biomedical Engineering

Affiliated Centers & Institutes

• Center for Imaging Science
• Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute

Education

• PhD, Neuroscience, Northwestern, 2012