School of Biomedical Sciences cordially invites you to join the following seminar:

Speaker: Professor Shy Shoham
Talk Title: Illuminating neural codes with multi-scale patterned optogenetics

Date: 08 July 2025 (Tuesday)
Time: 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Venue: LT3/LT4, G/F, William M.W. Mong Block, 21 Sassoon Road
Host: Professor Michael Hausser

Biography

Shy Shoham is the co-director of NYU’s Tech4Health institute. He is a Professor of Neuroscience and of Ophthalmology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, and an associated Professor of Biomedical Engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. His lab develops and applies photonic, acoustic and computational tools for bi-directional neural interfacing. He holds a Physics BSc from Tel-Aviv University, a Biomedical Engineering PhD from the University of Utah and was a Lewis-Thomas postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. He serves on the editorial boards of SPIE Neurophotonics, Journal of Neural Engineering and Translational Vision Sci. & Technology, and has co-edited the Handbook of Neurophotonics.

Abstract

How are environmental stimuli encoded in neural activity and how does this activity translate into perception? These are key questions towards one of Neuroscience’s fundamental goals: understanding how neural circuit activity mediates behavior. Recent experimental advances approaches are helping to shed light on the identity and timing of activated neurons that correlate with external sensory, as well as on which activity features are consequential for perception.

In this talk, I will highlight an emerging toolbox of neurophotonics and ‘synthetic perception’ behavioral techniques that now provides a new handle on this classical systems neuroscience problem. Our approach uses multi-scale all-optical approaches to achieve highly precise manipulation of neural activity at different scales. I will demonstrate how we use this strategy towards the dissection of computations underlying olfactory perception and for multiscale optogenetic interrogation of the effective connectivity between neurons.

All are welcome.