Jones Parker

About Jones Parker
Parker’s work encompasses both basic and translational neuroscience research. Throughout his career, he has focused on understanding the dopamine system’s role in normal and pathological behavior by probing the system with various in vivo recording techniques. In his graduate training with Richard Palmiter, he performed the first longitudinal recordings of phasic dopamine transmission in mice during reinforcement learning using fast-scan cyclic voltammetry. In his postdoctoral training with Mark Schnitzer and Michael Ehlers, he used calcium imaging to understand how dopamine modulates striatal spiny projection neurons (SPNs), how this process goes awry in diseases like Parkinson’s and schizophrenia, and how they might use this understanding to better treat those diseases.

As an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Northwestern University, Parker’s lab continues to use miniature microscopes and two-photon calcium imaging to better understand the function and dysfunction disease-related neural circuitry. The lab is specifically interested in understanding the mechanistic basis of interactions between dopamine dysfunction and how this alters neural ensemble coding to impact behaviors relevant to neurological and psychiatric disease. The overall goal of their work is to better understand these processes so that we might exploit nodes within these circuits to improve treatment outcomes for these diseases.

The Parker Lab
As an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Northwestern University, his lab continues to use miniature microscopes and two-photon calcium imaging to better understand the function and dysfunction disease-related neural circuitry. His lab has a specific interest in understanding the mechanistic basis of interactions between dopamine dysfunction and how this alters neural ensemble coding to impact behaviors relevant to neurological and psychiatric disease. The overall goal of their work is to better understand these processes so that they might exploit nodes within these circuits to improve treatment outcomes for these diseases. Learn more about the Parker Lab here.

Using in vivo Calcium Imaging to Understand How Antipsychotic Drugs Work and to Inform the Development of Better Ones.
Thanks to in vivo calcium imaging, we now have detailed knowledge about how specific neuron types and brain regions encode diverse behavioral processes. A great promise of this new knowledge is the possibility of harnessing it to better address the symptoms of neurological and psychiatric disease. Despite this great promise, very few groups actively use in vivo calcium imaging to advance therapeutic development. The Parker Lab routinely uses calcium imaging to identify the pathological neural dynamics of disease-associated brain states. Using this information, they devise and evaluate the potential of novel therapeutic strategies to normalize these pathological dynamics.

In this talk, Jones Parker will present a proof-of-concept for this therapeutic development approach, where they characterize how increased dopamine alters the neural ensemble dynamics of striatal D1 and D2 dopamine receptor-expressing spiny projection neurons (SPNs). Because excess striatal dopamine is linked to psychosis, they asked how different antipsychotic drugs affect these D1- and D2-SPN dynamics. Remarkably, even though these drugs preferentially block D2 receptors, their effects on D1-SPNs better explained their clinical efficacy than those on either D2-SPNs or behavior. Based on these findings, they tested three D1-SPN-targered therapeutic strategies, which all demonstrated antipsychotic potential in both behavioral and neural ensemble dynamic readouts. Their results suggest that D1-SPN activity is a more relevant therapeutic target than D2-SPN activity for the development of effective antipsychotics and adjudicate some basic strategies for doing so.