Huizhong Whit Tao
University of Southern California, CA·Neuroscience
How do brain circuits turn what the eyes see, or what disease does to tissue, into behavior and mood? Two projects pursue that question from different angles, both by recording and manipulating defined circuits in mice.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Physiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
neuropsychiatric symptoms
apathy
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2029
What they work on
- Map how cortical pathology and molecular, cellular and gene-expression changes in the anterior cingulate cortex develop alongside apathy-like behavioral impairments in two mouse models of Alzheimer's disease, using spatial transcriptomics with anatomy and pathology.
- Test whether altered excitation/inhibition balance in anterior cingulate cortex neurons causes apathy-like deficits in Alzheimer's model mice, and whether rebalancing circuit activity relieves them.
- Determine how glutamatergic input from the primary visual cortex shapes visual responses across layers of the superior colliculus and selects defensive reactions to looming stimuli by driving competition between local subcircuits.
- Test how GABAergic inhibitory input from the ventral lateral geniculate nucleus tunes superior colliculus responses to visual stimuli and sets size preference during approach behavior toward small moving dots.
More about the research
One asks why people with Alzheimer's disease develop psychiatric symptoms such as loss of motivation, and traces this to changes in a specific region of the cortex. The other asks how a midbrain visual center decides whether an animal should flee or approach, and how two incoming pathways tune that decision. Shared across both is an emphasis on the balance between excitation and inhibition in neural circuits, and on linking cellular measurements to behavior.
Why it matters
Apathy, anxiety and agitation in Alzheimer's disease burden patients and caregivers and often precipitate institutionalization, but have few targeted treatments; identifying the cortical changes behind them could point to new care strategies and therapeutic targets. The visual work clarifies general principles for how brain circuits convert sight into defensive or appetitive action, which may inform understanding of neurological and neuropsychiatric conditions involving altered circuit balance.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jianhua Cang
University of Virginia, VA·Neuroscience
Confirm that Cbln4-positive neurons in the mouse superficial superior colliculus are inhibitory and direction selective, map their shape and connections, and manipulate them to test whether they adjust motion responses based on surrounding context.
Philip Kragel
Emory University, GA·Neuroscience
Evaluate whether different superior colliculus pathways serve distinct functions, using machine learning models of brain connectivity while people perform avoidance learning, spatial attention and aversive-viewing tasks during fMRI.
Martha E Bickford
University of Louisville, KY·Neuroscience
Identify the retinal cells and other brain regions that feed two pretectal pathways, using monosynaptic rabies tracing with the calcium sensor GCaMP, two-photon imaging, electron microscopy and optogenetic slice recordings.
The school
University of Southern California: 47 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.