Nicholas Michelson

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I am a PhD student in the neuroscience program at the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Tim Murphy. Prior to joining the Murphy lab, I received my MS in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh and a BS in Biomedical Engineering from Binghamton University. My current research utilizes in vivo imaging techniques in mice to study neural circuits associated with social interaction.

Research Project

State-of-the-art methods for neural data acquisition have the potential to advance the field of social neuroscience, but uncontrollable variables or behaviours in freely interacting mice may impede data acquisition with certain optical or electrophysiological methods. My project with CONP is to
develop a cheap, open-source system to study reproducible, staged social interactions in mice while incorporating multi-modal data acquisition techniques. My hope is that this system will be a valuable resource to the field and will ultimately advance our understanding of the physiology that
shapes social behaviour.

Check out Nicholas’ presentation of his CONP project in a short talk entitled “Meso-social: An open-source approach to study cortical circuit activity in mice during constrained social interaction”.