Ben Vermaercke Email & Phone Number

Leuven, Belgium

Currently applying advanced in vivo imaging techniques to study human neuronal development. In a collaboration between the developmental neurobiology lab of prof. Pierre Vanderhaeghen and the neural systems&circuits imaging group of prof. Vincent Bonin, we have succeeded to observe the development of human cortical neurons after transplantation into the mouse brain. We show that these neurons can functionally integrate into the host circuit up to the point where they exhibit sensory responses not very different from mouse neurons. These findings are published here https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(19)30850-5?rss=yes#secsectitle0210. In future work we will expand this approach towards studying the role of disease-associated genes in neuronal development.

Leuven, Belgium

I study the neural representation of simple shapes in rodent lateral visual cortex. The responses of single neurons in this part of the rat brain can be linked to behavioral processses like tolerance to stimulus position and shape discrimination.

I studied high-level visual abilities in rodents using multiple behavioral setups I developed during my PhD. The data I obtained form a baseline for later eletrophysiological recordings in higher visual areas in awake rodents.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

With the generous support of the Research Foundation of Flanders (FWO), I will be working in the group of prof. David Cox at the Center for Brain Science for 18 months. My project is a continuation of my pre-doctoral work which revolved around the characterization of higher visual functions in rodents. I will study the visual cortical areas of rats using a 2-photon microscope. This technique allows the researcher to record from many neurons simultaneously and over an extended period of time. I will also benefit from the computational expertise present in this lab to optimize the analysis of the huge datasets that will be collected during my experiments.

During my early time in the lab, we worked on improving the automated behavioral assessment of rodents. Using video-processing techniques programmed in Matlab, we were able to construct more sensitive measures for analyzing animal behavior.Another project involved the automation of the radial arm maze; which is a spatial and working memory related task. I programmed a fully automated interface in visual basic to make the environment react to the animals behavior.Further, we developed an algorithm to analyze contextual fear data, speeding up high-throughput experiments testing new compounds for effectiveness.