Aaron Kuan
Yale University, CT·Neuroscience·Early-career
To understand how the brain computes, it helps to know how its neurons are wired together. No current imaging method can map that wiring across a whole brain.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biophysics
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
connectomics
X-ray nano-holography
synchrotron
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Aug 2026
What they work on
- Improve the resolution of X-ray nano-holography (XNH), which reconstructs 3D structure from interference patterns of coherent X-rays, at a fourth-generation synchrotron source so that synaptic connections between neurons are directly visible.
- Develop XNH imaging protocols that cover centimeter-scale brain volumes within a single beamline experiment, making brain-wide circuit imaging feasible.
- Validate the accuracy of XNH-based circuit reconstruction quantitatively by re-imaging the same non-destructively scanned tissue with electron and light microscopy.
- Use the correlative XNH workflow in the posterior parietal cortex to relate long-range sensory inputs, local synaptic micro-circuitry and single-neuron activity during perceptual decision-making.
- Image an entire cortical hemisphere with XNH and apply deep-learning machine vision to build an atlas of cortical connectivity resolving long-range connections at single-axon resolution.
More about the research
Light microscopy can cover large volumes but cannot resolve the fine connections between neurons; electron microscopy resolves individual synapses but cannot be applied to volumes anywhere near brain scale. This project develops an X-ray imaging approach at a synchrotron, a facility that produces extremely intense X-ray beams, to bridge that gap and image entire circuits at high resolution.
Why it matters
A map of long-range wiring across the cortex at single-axon resolution could show how different cortical areas become specialized and how distributed networks support cognition. Since such networks are altered in psychiatric disorders, the atlas and the imaging methods behind it could give researchers a concrete anatomical basis for studying those conditions, and the non-destructive workflow could be adopted broadly for large-volume brain imaging.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Christopher D Harvey
Harvard University, MA·Neuroscience
Map effective connectivity among functionally identified neurons in the posterior parietal cortex during a virtual-reality navigation decision task, using cellular-resolution optogenetics to stimulate small groups of neurons and testing wiring motifs predicted by decision-making theories.
Daniel P Ferris
University of Florida, FL·Biomedical Engineering
Test whether brief, intermittent visual occlusions during beam-walking balance training improve balance similarly in healthy younger and older adults.
Najib Majaj
New York University, NY·Neuroscience
Compare neural computations and behavioral algorithms in macaques foraging head-free in a foraging room with those during head-fixed navigation in virtual reality, to test whether restrained lab conditions differ from naturalistic ones.
The school
Yale University: 73 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.
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