Speakers > YU Xin

Xin YU (Dr Group Leader)

Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany

Xin Yu studied Neuroscience and Biophysics at New York University, USA. During his Ph.D. training in both neuroimaging and neuroscience, he implemented functional MRI to study the auditory midbrain plasticity and mid-hindbrain development in Dan Turnbull’s lab. Meanwhile, he was trained in the lab of Dan Sanes to target the inferior colliculus and collaborated with Rodolfo Llinas’s group to trace inferior olive with in vivo electrophysiology and Manganese-enhanced MRI (MEMRI). During his Postdoctoral training, he worked in Alan Koretsky’s lab in National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), National Institutes of Health (NIH). He combined MEMRI and BOLD-fMRI with electrophysiological recordings to study the system-to-synaptic brain plasticity. Using high-field fMRI (11.7T scanner), he made significant effort to push the spatiotemporal limit of fMRI so as to better understand the neurovascular coupling mechanism of fMRI. In his independent group (2014-present), he has specialized in developing advanced fMRI methods under high field (14T for animals, and 9.4T for humans) and implementing optogenetics and fiber-optic mediated calcium recording methods to build up multi-modal fMRI platform to study different brain states from varied disease models.

One research direction is to study the underlying mechanism of neurovascular coupling by identifying the signaling molecules propagating from neuron to glia, and to vessel. The other is to identify the “core switch” underlying the brain arousal and coma states by combining genetic tools with optical imaging and high field fMRI.  The goal is to identify candidate molecules from critical brain nuclei, which can contribute to switch brain states.  We are expected to translate the knowledge acquired from animal models to novel therapeutic treatment of coma patients.