About the Lab

Welcome to our new laboratory at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus.

We study hippocampal and reward-related learning in rats and mice.  We use extracellular recording to monitor the simultaneous activity of large numbers of neurons from several brain areas while an animal learns biologically-relevant tasks.  This allows us to get an overall picture of the neural circuits underlying these behaviors.  In order to monitor and manipulate the activity of a single neuron in much greater detail, we are developing methods to do intracellular recording in freely moving animals.  This will allow us to more directly study the cellular and synaptic mechanisms of learning during behavior.  We have previously demonstrated that such recordings are possible and can be of very high quality, and further developments are aimed at making the technique easier to use and more generally applicable.  Read more about our research.

Selected Publications

Epsztein J*, Lee AK*, Chorev E, Brecht M. Impact of spikelets on hippocampal CA1 pyramidal cell activity during spatial exploration. Science 327: 474-7, 2010. (*equally contributing) [PubMed]

Lee AK*, Epsztein J*, Brecht M. Head-anchored whole-cell recordings in freely moving rats. Nat Protoc. 4: 385-392, 2009. (*equally contributing) [PubMed]

Lee AK, Manns ID, Sakmann B, Brecht M. Whole-cell recordings in freely moving rats. Neuron 51: 399-407, 2006. [PubMed]

Lee AK, Wilson MA. A combinatorial method for analyzing sequential firing patterns involving an arbitrary number of neurons based on relative time order. J. Neurophysiol. 92: 2555-2573, 2004. [PubMed]

Lee AK, Wilson MA. Memory of sequential experience in the hippocampus during slow wave sleep. Neuron 36: 1183-1194, 2002. [PubMed]