Chung-Yueh (Jeremy) Lin

Chung-Yueh (Jeremy) Lin received his bachelor’s degree. in neuroscience and computer science at MIT. He is a rising fourth-year graduate student in the neuroscience graduate program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He has been a member in Takaki Komiyama’s lab for two years, where he has been investigating how different cortical circuits support value-based decision making. As an undergraduate researcher at MIT, he worked with Harvey Lodish and Susumu Tonegawa. Lin has experience in system neuroscience, cell biology, and computational programming and modeling.

Principal Investigator: Takaki Komiyama

Fellow: Arina Pecherskaya

Undergraduate Fellow Project: Investigating the inputs contributing to the potent, persistent value coding in RSC

Animals often encounter situations that require making decisions guided by their previous experiences to maximize the payout. This behavior involves multiple different kinds of information processing. Neural representations of choice, reward and action value have been observed in various brain regions, including the retrosplenial cortex (RSC), which receives inputs from many different brain regions. Whether these projections provide value information is unknown. Our lab will decode the neural activity of different axonal inputs in RSC by using two-photon microscopy to measure the calcium signals at the axon terminals. Both long-range inputs and inputs from nearby cortical regions will be examined. We hypothesize that different regions provide different value information to RSC (reward signals, updated chosen values, etc.). To evaluate their contribution to the value-based decision-making behavior, in a separate group of mice, our lab will inactivate a specific set of axons in RSC while monitoring their behavior. These experiments will give us substantial insight into the details of which inputs are critical for RSC to maintain value signals and whether local circuit motifs in RSC are required to persistently encode value information.