Michael Xiao

Twitter : @michaelxiao86

I’ve been a doctor mainly engaged in the research of Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders. When I came to Prof. Murphy’s lab in the second year of my PhD study, I was deeply attracted by the cutting-edge neurophysiological techniques, as it can probe the complex information flow in the brain during sensorimotor processing. I established new procedures for mapping connections between discrete cortical locations and sub-cortical brain structures, which will provide new insights in understanding brain functions and modulations that I intend to help translate from bench to bedside throughout my professional career.

Mapping the regional functional connectivity associated with the firing of individual neurons or specific behaviours is important to understand brain function and find therapeutic targets for brain stimulation or brain machine interfaces. We propose to establish a standard open source database of event-triggered functional maps, and build open source platforms for freely sharing data, code and analytical tools. In the context of Big Data and Open Science, this project will provide unique well-annotated material to the community, making efforts to spread our data more quickly and widely will help to see these data being used more efficiently and find their way to clinical applications that ultimately help patients through modelling of disease and treatment in mice.