Analyzing thalamo-cortical interactions with simultaneously acquired electrical and optical recordings (short or master thesis project)

Background:

Brain activity is organized across spatial and temporal scales. Understanding principles of these multiscale dynamics requires simultaneous monitoring of signals in multiple, distributed network nodes (see Lewis et al., 2023 or Machado et al., 2022). We have recently recorded a dataset with optical recordings from the cortex and simultaneous electrical recordings from the thalamus of the mouse brain (in collaboration with Baran Yasar, Prof. Fatih Yanik lab). In this project, you would analyze a part of this dataset under the supervision of Adrian Roggenbach and Dr. Chris Lewis in the laboratory of Prof. Fritjof Helmchen (lab website).

 

Goals:

• - Examine the relationship between thalamic neural activity and cortical activity patterns

• - Develop analysis methods to combine electrical (spike+LFP), optical (two-photon, widefield) and behavioral (body movements, pupil, whiskers) recordings

 

Methods:

• - Use and further develop an analysis pipeline with DataJoint (Link)

• - Time series analysis and interactive visualization

• - Cross-modal predictive models (e.g. GLMs or deep neural networks)

• - Unsupervised clustering (e.g. time-invariant or hidden-Markov models)

 

Requirements:

• - Programming experience in Python

• - Interest in neuroscience and data analysis

 

Details:

• - Project duration 1.5 to 9 months, flexible starting date

• - Applications should include a short statement of research interest and a CV

 

Contact:

Adrian Roggenbach (roggenbach@hifo.uzh.ch)

Dr. Chris Lewis (lewis@hifo.uzh.ch)