I am a systems neuroscientist and biophysicist driven by a central question: how does the brain convert the rich, dynamic sensory world into memories, decisions, and purposeful action? My laboratory uses olfaction—the sense that links sensation of complex volatile chemicals, emotion, learning, memory, and navigation—as an exceptionally powerful window into this problem. We investigate how neural circuits extract meaning from complex odors, learn their significance, and use that information to guide behavior in health and disease.

Our research follows sensory information from the olfactory system into the broader brain networks that support learning and action, including piriform cortex, hippocampus, cerebellum, and associated circuits. By combining precisely controlled behavioral tasks with recordings and perturbations of neural activity, we seek to reveal not only where sensory information is represented, but also how it is transformed into decisions in real time.

We bring together advanced experimental and computational approaches: awake-behaving multielectrode recordings, high-speed optical imaging, closed-loop optogenetics, spatial transcriptomics and proteomics, connectomics, immunofluorescence, and artificial intelligence–based image analysis. This interdisciplinary strategy enables us to bridge scales—from molecules and individual neurons to coordinated neural populations and natural behavior—and to explore how these processes change in disease.

A major focus of the laboratory is the role of dorsal CA1 hippocampal circuits in odor-guided decision-making. In mice learning go/no-go odor discriminations, we have shown that odor valence can be decoded from gamma-band activity organized by the phase of slower theta rhythms. These findings point to theta–gamma phase-amplitude coupling as a candidate mechanism through which the hippocampus integrates sensory evidence with learned value. In collaboration with Dr. Emily Gibson, we have also identified moments when dorsal CA1 neural activity sharply diverges as mice make odor-guided choices, revealing sequential, decision-predicting dynamics that may form a cognitive time map for associative learning.

We are extending these studies beyond traditional laboratory tasks to examine how the brain solves sensory problems in conditions that resemble the real world. With Dr. John Crimaldi, we developed an automated odor-plume arena in which mice navigate complex, turbulent odor environments while we record dorsal CA1 activity with miniature microscopes. This work addresses how hippocampal networks combine odor, space, time, and uncertainty to guide navigation through changing environments.

Technology development is a defining feature of our program. Through close collaborations with physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and industry partners, we create imaging and optogenetic tools that make previously inaccessible circuit-level questions experimentally tractable. With Drs. Juliet Gopinath and Emily Gibson, supported by the NIH and NSF BRAIN Initiative, we developed Opto2P-FCM, a miniature MEMS-based, fiber-coupled two-photon microscope that combines neural imaging with patterned holographic optogenetic stimulation. We are also advancing multiphoton imaging and three-dimensional holographic stimulation systems capable of recording from thousands of neurons while selectively manipulating large, defined neural ensembles.

My laboratory is deeply engaged in understanding how the olfactory system serves as both a sensory gateway to the brain and a potential site of vulnerability in aging, neurodegeneration, and viral disease. In collaboration with Drs. Andrew Bubak, Christy Niemeyer and Maria Nagel our work on alpha-herpesviruses has defined how HSV-1 can access the central nervous system through olfactory and trigeminal routes and revealed striking regional differences in the brain’s microglial response to infection. We have also shown that noninfectious extracellular vesicles released from varicella-zoster-virus–infected sensory neurons can suppress host type I interferon responses, uncovering a mechanism by which viral signals may alter neural and immune function beyond the primary site of infection enhancing viral infection of the brain through the olfactory system.

These studies intersect with our work on Alzheimer’s disease, where we identified signatures of viral infection in the olfactory bulb and inflammation, altered myelination, and microglial activation in the olfactory tract of individuals with familial Alzheimer’s disease. Because this pathway connects the olfactory bulb to the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus, our findings raise the possibility that infection-associated inflammation in the proximal olfactory system may compromise circuits essential for memory and contribute to disease progression.  Building on our foundational studies of human olfactory neurons and epithelium, we are developing OLFACTO-SCOPE, an endoscopic imaging platform designed to identify and study olfactory epithelium directly in patients.

I am equally committed to education and mentorship. I aim to cultivate scientists who are fluent across biology, physics, engineering, computation, and quantitative reasoning—and who have the creativity and rigor to ask ambitious questions about the brain. Through inclusive, collaborative training, my laboratory prepares students and trainees not simply to use new technologies, but to invent them, apply them thoughtfully, and become independent leaders in science.