Eric Yttri, PhD

The Yttri lab interrogates the functional interactions of the motor circuit (motor cortex, basal ganglia, midbrain dopamine nuclei) that lead to skilled behavior. Our research approach is inclusive yet specific: interrogating the functional interactions between areas in a manner more typical of cognitive neuroscience (e.g. fMRI) while also identifying the computational contributions of individual cell types within each region. We combine a diverse set of tools to determine the neural mechanisms of motor behavior and movement diseases: Behavioral (reaching task in a mouse, quantitative open-field locomotion, Parkinson’s disease models) Physiological (50, 100 and 1000 channel electrodes, blue and red shifted channel rhodopsins, closed-loop stimulation, and Computational (dynamical systems analyses of neural population activity and machine learning-based categorization of behavior). These methods allow us sample and manipulate the neural activity of multiple areas simultaneous in our effort to understand the mechanisms of motor behavior and movement diseases