Dr. Chun XU is the Head of the Laboratory of Neurobiology of Context and Behavior. He graduated from Xiamen University with a B.S. degree in Biology (2003) and received his Ph.D. degree in Neurobiology from the Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2009. After completing Ph.D., he conducted postdoctoral research with Dr. Andreas Lüthi in the Friedrich Miescher Institute at Switzerland (2009-2016). Dr. XU joined ION as a Principal Investigator in January 2017.

Title: Target pattern-dependent emotional processing in hippocampal circuits

Abstract: The ventral hippocampus is widely connected with brain areas in the thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdala and prefrontal cortex, and plays crucial roles in the emotional processing for rewards and punishments. By leveraging the power of single-neuron projectome analysis, he will present findings on the target pattern of distinct projectome cell types in the thalamo-hippocampal circuit, and specific functions of these cell types and circuits in the emotional processing including fear memory generalization.