Martha E Bickford
University of Louisville, KY·Neuroscience
Seeing is an active process. We move our eyes and bodies, and the brain must tie what we see to how we move.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biology
- Topics
pretectum
visual thalamus
lateral geniculate nucleus
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Identify the retinal cells and other brain regions that feed two pretectal pathways, using monosynaptic rabies tracing with the calcium sensor GCaMP, two-photon imaging, electron microscopy and optogenetic slice recordings.
- Determine the visual and movement-related responses of pretectal neurons projecting to the LGN/TRN or the pulvinar, using recordings in awake mice with optogenetic opto-tagging to identify cell types.
- Test how pretectal input changes visual responses in the lateral geniculate nucleus, thalamic reticular nucleus and pulvinar by switching pretectal axons on with light during recordings in awake animals.
- Test whether turning on pretectal pathway neurons with cre- and flp-dependent chemogenetics alters depth perception (stereopsis) or reflexive optokinetic eye movements.
More about the research
Deep brain relay stations called the visual thalamus help with this. Yet a nearby region that feeds them, the pretectum, has barely been studied in mammals. How the pretectum shapes thalamic visual signals, and through them behavior, is unknown.
Why it matters
Knowing how the brain links visual motion to eye movements could inform treatment of conditions in which visual motion processing is impaired, such as dyslexia and schizophrenia. It could also help develop eye tracking as a medical diagnostic and improve understanding of eye movement disorders including nystagmus, strabismus and amblyopia.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Aleisha Moore
Kent State University at Kent, OH·Neuroscience
Test whether estradiol and progesterone fail to suppress KNDy neuron activity in prenatally androgenized PCOS model mice, using in vivo calcium imaging of individual neurons in freely behaving animals alongside LH pulse measurements.
Maria Geffen
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience
Train mice by operant conditioning to detect or discriminate target sounds in background noise, and vary noise contrast before each target to test how adaptation to the background interacts with target detection.
Jianhua Cang
University of Virginia, VA·Neuroscience
Confirm that Cbln4-positive neurons in the mouse superficial superior colliculus are inhibitory and direction selective, map their shape and connections, and manipulate them to test whether they adjust motion responses based on surrounding context.
The school
University of Louisville: 15 labs on PI Pages, $225M a year on research, 159 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.