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Biology Seminar Series: Harris Kaplan - "A coming-of-age story: neuronal control of behavior in early life"

Date
Thu February 6th 2025, 4:00 - 5:00pm
Location
Clark Center
318 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94305
Clark S360

Harris aims to understand how the infant brain controls behavior, with a focus on homeostatic needs such as sleep and thermoregulation. Harris is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Catherine Dulac’s lab at Harvard University. He began his scientific career as an undergraduate at New York University, where he worked in Justin Blau’s lab on neuronal circuits underlying circadian rhythms in Drosophila. Harris then moved to Vienna, Austria, where he performed his PhD work in Manuel Zimmer’s lab at the IMP. During his PhD, Harris identified neuronal population dynamics governing locomotor behaviors in C. elegans, using a novel brain-wide, single-cell calcium imaging approach. Harris moved to Harvard in 2020, where he has focused on the hypothalamic preoptic area, a brain region that governs homeostatic needs and social behaviors. Harris established a molecular developmental atlas of the mouse preoptic area using single-nucleus RNA sequencing, which illuminated the diversification and maturation of ~150 transcriptionally defined cell types, many of which have established roles in behaviors such as parenting, sleep, and thermoregulation. In his future work, Harris will use this dataset as a foundation to understand the molecular, cellular, and circuit mechanisms underlying the infant brain’s control of homeostatic needs.