Adam S. Charles
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
The brain computes through huge numbers of small, fast events. Individual cells send signals within milliseconds, yet behavior emerges from activity coordinated across the whole brain.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Neuroscience
Computer Science
- Topics
computational neuroscience
computational imaging
two-photon microscopy
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Sep 2029
What they work on
- Build and validate a two-photon microscope that combines one-dimensional blurring, random line sub-sampling and low-rank matrix completion reconstruction to image a large field of view at over 400 Hz, demonstrated with dense glutamate imaging in mice.
- Develop a light-sheet microscope using the same blurred matrix completion approach to image the entire larval zebrafish brain at over 200 Hz, demonstrated with whole-brain voltage imaging.
- Develop a behaviorally decomposed dynamical systems model that ties brain-wide subsystems in larval zebrafish to swim bouts and visual stimuli during navigation, and extend it to capture one-directional neuron–glia interactions.
- Create a multi-scale missing-neuron dynamical system that treats unrecorded neurons as hidden variables, and apply it to multi-electrode recordings of rodent visual decision making to see how pathways change on error trials.
More about the research
Seeing both scales at once requires tools that record quickly over large areas. Making sense of those recordings also requires models that reveal how separate brain systems work together. The lab's two projects address both needs. One builds faster microscopes through computation, and the other builds mathematical models of how brain-wide activity is organized during behavior.
Why it matters
Faster imaging over large brain areas could let neuroscientists follow millisecond signals such as voltage and glutamate across whole circuits, and the optics are designed to be easy for other labs to adopt. The modeling work adds basic understanding of how brain systems coordinate during navigation and decision making. It could eventually inform research on brain dysfunction and on building more robust artificial intelligence.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
David Tank
Princeton University, NJ·Neuroscience
Identify which task features (active navigation, passive navigation, or visual stimulation) produce sequential neural activity, by recording from relevant mouse brain regions during tasks that isolate each feature.
Scott Laughlin
Stony Brook University, NY·Neuroscience
Develop pro-fluorescent lipid tracers, similar to DiI and DiO, that become fluorescent only after reacting with an activator, to label chosen neuron populations in fixed post-mortem brain tissue.
Shreya Saxena
Yale University, CT·Neuroscience
Learn subject-independent dynamical models of cortical activity in mice performing a decision-making task, while separately quantifying each animal's subject-specific dynamics.
The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
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