While our permanent lab space is not ready yet, during the past year we have set up a physiology lab in our temporary space, and two post docs have joined the lab (one has arrived, the other one will join soon). We have started two projects in the temporary space. One of them involves perturbation of the neural activity in primary visual cortex. The training of the animal for this study is finished and we hope to start the data collection phase soon. The other project involves optogenetic stimulation of the inferior temporal (IT) cortex. This study is a little further ahead, the animal is trained, induced with optogenetic constructs and implanted with optical arrays in the left and right IT. We are now excited to start the data collection for this project soon. We are also at the preliminary stages of a third project that involves face-selective patches of neurons in IT cortex and their causal role in face perception. Given the growth in the number of people (now two post bacs and two post docs and the PI) in the lab, also the progress on the training stages of our projects, our performance will be highly dependent on the completion of the construction of our permanent space, which should be complete in fall 2018.
