Team Leader : Naoya Takahashi

Naoya Takahashi received his PhD at the University of Tokyo (advisor: Prof. Yuji Ikegaya), studying spatial organization of synaptic inputs in dendrites. He moved to Berlin for his postdoc at the laboratory Prof. Matthew Larkum (Humboldt University), where he studied active roles of cortical neuron dendrites in somatosensory processing. As a recipient of the Grass Fellowship in 2018, he worked as a summer investigator at the Marine Biological Laboratory (Woods Hole, MA).

Since 2020, he is a team leader at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Neuroscience (IINS). By combining a wide range of tools and methods in neurophysiology and behavioral neuroscience, his team aims to understand cellular and circuit mechanisms that controls tactile perception in mice.

General objective

Attention and contextual knowledge are prerequisites for perception and decision making. The goal of my team is to identify the neuronal mechanisms underlying cognitive control and contextual modulation of perception and behavioral actions.

Towards this goal, my team focuses on tactile sensation in mice, one of the most predominant sensory modalities in rodents to perceive the world. We investigate how tactile inputs are processed and modulated in the somatosensory cortex. Our particular interest lies in understanding the synaptic and dendritic processes that shape the output of single cortical neurons at different brain states (e.g., attention) and contexts (e.g., behavioral demands).

We use a variety of in vivo techniques to achieve these goals: two-photon and one-photon subcellular imaging, whole-cell patch clamp recording, optogenetics and chemogenetics, virus-mediated circuit tracing, psychophysical analysis of mouse tactile behavior. We also have an interest in developing new imaging tools and genetic/molecular tools via collaborations to probe cortical activity with subcellular resolution in awake behaving mice.