Our permanent lab space was delivered to us in November 2018. Since then, we have set up a complete electrophysiology rig (for both neural recording and stimulation), a drug microinjection rig (setup for injecting very small amounts of drugs in a controlled way into various cortical areas) as well as a separate setup for high throughput optogenetic research in non-human primates. The optogenetics setup works based on an implantable array of LEDs that is developed by the PI. Using this implantable optical array we can reversibly perturb the neural activity in small bits of inferior temporal cortex and we can collect and pool data across months, this allows us for the first time, to take a high throughput approach to the behavioral results of optogenetics in non-human primates by increasing the size of our behavioral dataset 100 folds. During the past year we have also finished training of the animals and started data collection in the optogenetic and electrophysiology setups. Two postdocs have joined the lab during the past year and a third postdoc is hired, she will join the lab in September 2019. In summary, during the past year we developed our space into a fully functional nonhuman primate lab and we are excited to see the first wave of results as this summary is being composed.
