"Thalamic gating of cortical state: from circuitry to neural dynamics"

Michael Halassa is an instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a resident in Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and a Neuroscience research fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studies the role of neural dynamics in behavioral state regulation using multi-site multi-electrode recordings and has discovered that astrocytes regulate sleep dynamics and sleep behavior. He now studies how behavior modulates circuit activity (field potentials and spike-train statistics) in identified forebrain structures. He combines electrophysiology with causal genetic tools (optogenetics and chemical genetics) to dissect the circuit basis of neural dynamics underlying arousal states.