Seminar “In Vivo Calcium Imaging of Neural Circuits” by Dr. Vania Cao

Title: “In Vivo Calcium Imaging of Neural Circuits”

Speaker CV/Academic History: Dr. Vania Cao is the Commercial Programs Lead at Inscopix Inc. She received her B.S. in Microbiology from The Pennsylvania State University, and her PhD in Neuroscience from Brown University.

She conducted her doctoral and postdoc research at the U.S National Institutes of Mental Health. Her research focused on in vivo two-photon imaging of experience-dependent neural circuit changes during motor learning*. Dr. Cao has hands-on experience with in vivo calcium imaging, and has been training neuroscientists around the world on Inscopix miniaturized microscopy technology. 

Abstract: Circuit neuroscience is benefiting greatly from new innovations in vivo microscopy. Head-mounted miniature microscopes enable one-photon epifluorescence imaging of calcium dynamics, providing a correlate of neural activity from the same population of potentially hundreds of cells over time.

With single-cell resolution and cell-type specificity in almost any brain region, you can investigate many important research questions in freely-behaving animal models of learning, memory, development and disease. Today, calcium imaging (nVista) and integrated optogenetics (nVoke) experiments can be done with the gold standard, ready-to-use miniscope systems from Inscopix Inc. *Cao, VY. Neuron. 2015 Jun 17;86(6):1385-92