A new NIH-funded collaboration between David Prober (Caltech), Thai Truong (USC) and Geoff Goodhill (Washington University in St Louis) aims to gain new insight into the neural circuits underlying sleep, through a combination of whole-brain neural recordings in zebrafish and theoretical/computational modeling. The Goodhill lab is now looking for 2 postdocs for the modeling and computational analysis components.

Using novel 2-photon imaging technologies Prober and Truong will record from the entire larval zebrafish brain at single-neuron resolution continuously for long periods of time, examining neural circuit activity during normal day-night cycles and in response to genetic and pharmacological perturbations. The Goodhill lab will analyze the resulting huge datasets using a variety of sophisticated computational approaches, and use these results to build new theoretical models that reveal how neural circuits interact to govern sleep. Theoretical and experimental work will be intimately linked.