Jan Zimmermann
University of Minnesota, MN·Neuroscience
How does the brain route information between regions? And how does it coordinate behavior that unfolds over split seconds, minutes, and longer?
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
Psychology
- Topics
functional MRI
fMRI
ultra-high field MRI
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Jan 2029
What they work on
- Develop radiofrequency coil hardware for 10.5 Tesla MRI that resolves layer-specific fMRI responses in the macaque cortex, revealing feedforward and feedback signals.
- Test whether whole-brain directional connectivity estimated from layer-resolved fMRI in macaques matches ground-truth tract tracing of nerve fiber connections.
- Establish whether the timescales of freely moving macaques' posture, tracked with deep learning pose estimation, encode cognitive variables such as reward expectation during foraging.
- Link neural and behavioral timescales by recording wireless multi-region single-neuron activity along the medial prefrontal wall to the anterior cingulate cortex, analyzed with embedding and connectivity methods.
- Combine 10.5T and 16.4T MRI with electrophysiology and multiphoton imaging to understand how fMRI signals relate to underlying neuronal activity and to build shareable technologies.
More about the research
Brain scans of people are noninvasive, but they are blurry and indirect. Electrode recordings are precise, but they are invasive. This work connects the two by studying rhesus macaques, monkeys whose brains closely resemble ours. It combines ultra-high-field magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with direct measures of neural activity, and pairs these with studies of how monkeys behave when moving freely.
Why it matters
Many psychiatric illnesses disrupt flexible behavior and how brain circuits communicate. Validated tools for measuring directional brain connectivity in monkeys, and a clearer link between fMRI signals and neuron activity, could help researchers translate animal findings into human studies of mental illness. Understanding how the brain balances short- and long-term demands could also inform the study of these disorders.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
TRD1: Multimodal Imaging for Spanning Multiple Spatial Scales in the Brain; Expansion to New Technologies and Species
NIH · Feb 2019 – Jan 2029
Connectome style neuroimaging in non human primates via novel integrated RF platforms
NIH · Mar 2022 – Dec 2026
Neural basis of behavioral timescale coordination
NIH · Dec 2021 – Oct 2026
Closest labs
Silvia Bunge
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Neuroscience
Test whether the anterior lateral prefrontal cortex is domain-general by measuring its fMRI activity and connections with other regions during four relational reasoning tasks spanning visual and auditory, spatial and semantic stimuli.
Theresa Desrochers
Brown University, RI·Neuroscience·Early-career
Use fMRI in behaving macaque monkeys to identify which frontal brain areas track nonmotor, nonspatial sequences, testing whether the medial prefrontal cortex mainly encodes each item's position in the sequence.
Joshua I Gold
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience
Develop and test a mathematical theory of adaptive decision bounds that update during deliberation, using behavioral experiments in humans and combined behavioral and neural studies in monkeys making decisions under changing conditions.
The school
University of Minnesota: 88 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 722 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.