James Jeanne, PhD

Jamie received a B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 2005 and a Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience from UC San Diego in 2012. As a graduate student with Dr. Timothy Gentner and Dr. Tatyana Sharpee, he investigated plasticity in neural population codes in the auditory cortex of the European Starling, a common species of songbird with an exceptional capacity for learning. As a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Rachel Wilson at Harvard Medical School, he studied the functional roles of convergent and divergent neural circuit motifs in the olfactory system of the fruit fly. Subsequently, using 2-photon optogenetic circuit mapping, he has begun to reveal the functional organization of higher-order olfactory circuits. He joined the Department of Neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine in the Fall of 2017.

The Jeanne Lab is broadly interested in understanding how neural circuits implement the computations that support behavior. We study the fruit fly because of its tractability: the brain contains only 100,000 neurons, neural circuits are stereotyped from fly to fly (down to the level of individual neurons), and large libraries of genetic driver lines enable precise targeting of individual neurons for physiology experiments. Current research aims to understand the circuit and computational mechanisms of sensory processing, working memory, and decision making.