Prof Justus Kebschull (Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University)

“We ask how new brain regions and cell types form in evolution, how they connect to the rest of the brain, and what this tells us about the organizing principles and function of the vertebrate brain. To do so, we employ spatial transcriptomics across widely divergent vertebrate species and models of disease during development, and develop new barcoding technologies to map neuronal connectivity at single-cell resolution in high throughput by converting anatomy into a sequencing problem. Here we present sequencing-based neuroanatomical tracing tools for species ranging from amphibians to monkeys, and apply them to understand evolution and function of the cerebellum”.