Ching-Lung Hsu Email & Phone Number

Research Interest: I work at an intersection of systems and cellular neurosciences, enthusiastic about linking the physiology and biophysics of single cells to neural network functions in learning/memory, spatial navigation and sensory processes in the mammalian brains, particularly for the areas called hippocampus and thalamus. Hippocampus is like a GPS in your brain. Thalamus is like a master conduit of sensory information from the environment to your 'higher-level' brain, neocortex.My long-term goal is to provide causal explanations for how brain cells encodes representations of the environments according to the 'contexts' of behavior. This is an important basis of cognition. For instance, your perception/cognition can change according to what you've just experienced or/and where attention is directed to.Currently, I'm trying to figure out how a cellular physiologist can work in concert with neurotheorists, and to what extent understanding mechanisms of single-neuron computation could constrain/define algorithmic architecture, to help gain insight for the working of circuits postulated by any top-down neurotheory.My education and training have placed me in a great position to create multi-level mechanistic understanding of neuron coding and neural plasticity.Primary approaches:1. Electrophysiology: intracellular/patch-clamp and extracellular recordings in acute brain slices and awake, behaving rodents (electric recording of neural activities from particular parts of a single cell, such as soma and dendrites, and from a population of cells)2. Pharmacology3. Functional imaging: two-photon miscroscopy live imaging (optical recording of neural activities, such as changes of calcium concentration at single synapses)4. Animal behavioral paradigm (in particular, for mouse virtual reality)5. Computational modeling (neurons with realistic morphology, ion channels & biophysics)6. Anatomical mapping of neural circuits, targeted expression of protein reporters/effectors in specific subgroups of cells, using viruses and geneticsResearch, teaching and writing are all rewarding to my life. Besides academia, I'm open to all kinds of career trajectory.

Listed skills include Electrophysiology, Neurobiology, Neurophysiology, Patch Clamp, and 15 others.