Au Lab

We work on the inhibitory neurons of the cortex known as cortical interneurons (cINs). We study how cINs establish circuits in the cortex early on in embryonic and early childhood stages. A growing body of work also implicates cIN dysfunction in neuropsychiatric disease and we are, therefore, also interested in how cINs contribute disease etiology in mental illness.

Our Approach: We employ several experimental approaches to study cIN development. First, we use stem cell directed differentiation to generate cIN. In the course of differentiation, we perturb developmental programs to assess their functional importance. Second, we use a combination of in vitro and in vivo assays to ascertain and study molecular determinants of cIN development. Third, we recently developed an image-based method for assessing cIN synapses at a population level.