Colloquium
Time: 15:00pm, June 16, 2025
Venue: Lecture Hall, Shanghai Brain Center
Speaker: Prof. BI Guoqiang
University of Science and Technology of China; Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology,Chinese Academy of Science
Host：Dr. Henry Evrard
Biography:
Guo-Qiang Bi is a Xinchuang Professor of Neurobiology and Biophysics at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), and Founding Director of Interdisciplinary Center for Brain Information at Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT), Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received his BS in physics at Peking University, PhD in biophysics at UC Berkeley and postdoctoral training in neurobiology at UCSD. Before joining USTC, he was a tenured Associate Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. His research interest is in the cross-scale architecture and dynamics of neuronal systems, especially those related to plasticity and learning. In recent years, his team has combined cryogenic electron tomography with correlative photonic techniques to investigate in situ organization and operation of molecular machinery inside neuronal synapses, and developed new mesoscale imaging approaches to map system-wide architecture and cross-regional activity of neurons and networks from brain to body.
Abstract:
The nervous system consists of myriad interconnected neurons that form intricate networks spanning the entire brain and the whole organism. The coordinated neuronal activity in this complex network generates perception, emotion, learning, and consciousness and regulates body physiology. In the past years, we have developed a high-speed, large-scale, volumetric fluorescence microscopy technique VISoR capable of imaging a whole rhesus monkey brain at micron resolution within 100 hours, enabling efficient mesoscale connectomic mapping of the primate brain, revealing unexpected trajectories and complex arborization patterns of individual thalamocortical axons. More recently, we have developed a blockface-VISoR system to achieve uniform micron-resolution imaging and single axon tracing of the peripheral nervous system across the entire mouse body, providing an unprecedented high-resolution view of its architecture and revealing intricate routes of fiber projection. Beyond structural mapping, we have developed an ultracompact head-mounted fluorescent microscope to simultaneously image neuronal activity from up to four brain areas in a freely moving mouse.