Vlad Susoy

In my role as a program manager, I support a high-throughput connectomics project aimed at reconstructing a complete wiring diagram of 10 mm3 of the mouse hippocampal formation, a brain area involved in spatial navigation and memory. The project involves eight research groups working together to map the hippocampal circuitry – from EM imaging and neuron reconstruction to multi-modal cell-typing and circuit discovery. One of the main goals of the project is to develop a scalable pipeline that could one day allow synapse-level reconstruction of an entire mouse brain.

I received my Ph.D. in evolutionary developmental biology (MPI Tübingen) and I did my postdoc in systems neuroscience (Harvard Physics). During my postdoc, I focused on brain-wide recordings of neuronal activity in unrestrained, freely behaving C. elegans nematodes. Combined with the wiring diagram, these functional recordings enabled mechanistic circuit-level understanding of a complex multistep behavior. Recent advances in electron microscopy (EM) make such system-wide approaches feasible for much larger brains.