Jennifer Shum named Whitaker International Fellow
Jennifer Shum, a graduating senior in Prof. Chris Schaffer's research group, was awarded the Whitaker International Fellow Grant to do research at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland. The program was established by the Whitaker Foundation to provide opportunities for international experiences in biomedical engineering. Jennifer will be working in Dr. Rainer Friedrich’s lab on the patterned optical stimulation of neuronal circuits using digital light processing (DLP) technology. She will be working with zebrafish that express channelrhodpsin-2, a light gated ion channel that allows manipulation of neuronal activity by light with high spatial and temporal precision. Using optical stimulation combined with calcium imaging, she hopes to map neuronal connectivity and explore how the processing of patterns of neural activity depends on their spatial and temporal structure.
