Christopher Harvey

About Christopher Harvey 
Christopher Harvey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. The Harvey lab seeks to understand how the mammalian brain performs the computations that underlie cognitive functions, including decision-making and spatial navigation, at the level of the building blocks of the nervous system, cell types and neural populations organized into circuits.

Harvey’s work has developed methods to measure, manipulate, and analyze neural circuits across spatial and temporal scales, including technology for virtual reality, optical imaging, optogenetics, intracellular electrophysiology, molecular sensors, and computational modeling. His work has been recognized by various awards, including most recently the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award and the Society for Neuroscience Young Investigator Award.

Watch Chris Harvey’s NPC Symposium talk below.

Interested in learning more? Check out the Q&A session:

The Harvey Lab
Learn more about the Harvey Lab here.

Probing Computations in Neural Circuits Using Single-neuron Perturbations 
A major goal in neuroscience is to understand how local neuronal populations transform the information they receive as inputs. Toward this goal, we have developed a new method in which we use single-neuron perturbations combined with large-scale, cellular-resolution population activity measurements to map the causal, functional connectivity among neurons with characterized tuning. We call this method influence mapping – a measure of how one neuron’s spiking affects spiking in its neighbors. We have discovered a like-suppresses-like motif in layer 2/3 of mouse visual cortex that reduces redundancy in population activity and may assist inference of the features underlying sensory input. I will also outline how we are applying influence mapping to the study of computations for decision-making during spatial navigation.