Talk Title: TBD

Li Lab | Duke Neurobiology
Associate Professor of Neurobiology

Our goal is to understand how the brain generates volitional movement. A planning phase precedes all volitional movements in which the brain programs appropriate movement on the fly to achieve the goal at hand. This fundamental process dictates our behavior, ranging from speech to motor skills. We study how different brain regions and cell types organize into functional circuits to orchestrate neural dynamics driving volitional movement.

Our work has isolated neural antecedents of volitional movements in the mouse brain (also known as ‘preparatory activity’ or ‘readiness potentials’ in humans). Our ongoing studies outline a distributed network of over a dozen brain areas that mediate planning and execution of volitional movement. To understand neural networks distributed across such a wide scale, we are developing new approaches to map, manipulate, and analyze multi-regional circuits in the intact brain during behavior.