Liang Liang, PhD, BS

Our laboratory studies the computation of information selectivity along the visual hierarchy, taking a combination of in vivo imaging, genetic, behavioral, and computational approaches. Our research primarily focuses on visual thalamic circuitry. The primary visual thalamus integrates inputs from the retina with inputs from multiple brain centers, and the thalamic output provides the main feedforward visual information to the cortex. Rather than being a simple relay station, a growing body of research suggests that rich visual computation and neuromodulation already takes place in the thalamus prior to the cortex. However, in contrast to the retina and visual cortex, we know much less about the visual computation associated to the thalamus. For example, it remains unclear how diverse channels of retinal information may be enriched, reinforced and flexibly tuned in the thalamus and how thalamic visual processing impacts downstream visual representation. By integrating our newly developed imaging technologies and several state-of-the-art methods, we will dissect the functional organization of synapses and neural circuits in the thalamus at an unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution, and identify the rules of computing visual information selectivity there. We also work on cracking the long-range functional connectivity of the retino-thalamo-cortical visual pathway to understand the progressive contribution of visual centers in establishing visual feature representations.