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Alex Kwan, PhD

Associate Professor Adjunct of Psychiatry
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About

Titles

Associate Professor Adjunct of Psychiatry

Biography

Alex Kwan is an Associate Professor in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University. Before moving to Cornell in 2022, he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine.

He received a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Physics from Simon Fraser University and a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Cornell University. At Cornell, he developed nonlinear optical microscopes in the laboratory of Watt Webb. In 2009, he went to the University of California, Berkeley to work in the laboratory of Yang Dan, where he studied cortical microcircuits.

Research in the Kwan lab focuses on the mouse medial frontal cortex. We are interested in how dendritic plasticity may underlie the actions of psychiatric drugs and how cortical circuits enable flexible decision-making. Our expertise lies in developing and applying optical methods to record and control neural activity in behaving mice.

Appointments

  • Psychiatry

    Associate Professor Adjunct
    Primary

Other Departments & Organizations

Education & Training

Postdoctoral
University of California, Berkeley (2009 - 2013) (2013)
PhD
Cornell University (2009)
MS
Cornell University (2007)
BS
Simon Fraser University (2003)

Research

Overview

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)

Antidepressive Agents; Decision Making; Dendrites; Depressive Disorder; Electrophysiology; Microscopy, Fluorescence; Optogenetics; Prefrontal Cortex

Research at a Glance

Yale Co-Authors

Frequent collaborators of Alex Kwan's published research.

Publications

2024

2023

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