Welcome to our lab! Below are some of our ongoing research projects. Basically, we are interested in anything that deals with differences in brain organization across species, the relationship between different levels of brain organization, and the relationship between brain organization and behavioral repertoire.
One of our main interests is in building and applying methods to quantitatively compare the organization of different species' brains. Different brains often show remarkable variation in size and morphology, meaning that simple registration does not work. We have developed what we call the 'common space approach'. This describes different brains in terms of abstract features spaces in which multiiple brains are describing in terms of the same organizational features, such as white matters tracts or expression of orthologous genes.
Using the methods we develop, we compare the organization of different species' brains in detail. To date, we have studied a large range of primates, identifying specializations in the ape lineage. We have also shown what types of reorganization occur, including expansion and reorganization of areas and invasion of corrtical territory by new connections. Rencently, we have expanded this work to the carnivore brain.
Our methods for comparing brain organization across species have the potential to help improve the translation from preclincal results to human clinical neuroscience. Together with our collaborators in the preclinical group, we are now building mouse-human translational brain models and aim to relate those directly to mouse transgenic lines and human clinical data.
The human brain shows adaptations not seen in other brains, just as other brains show their unique adaptations. We use a variety of human cognitive neuroscience technqiues to study how these unique aspects of the human brain contribute to our behavioral abilities. Much of this work has focused on the neural basis of social decision making.