Jian-Young Wu, PhD

Professor

Ph.D., 1986, Peking University, China

Basic Science Building, Room 207A
Phone: 202.687.1614 
Email: wuj@georgetown.edu

My laboratory studies population neuronal activity. Large-scale neuronal activity is a hallmark of living brain. All brain functions are carried out by organized activation of large number of neurons.  Studying population neuronal activity is a basic step in the understanding of normal brain functions and in pathological disorders such as epilepsy.

I enjoy doing experiments myself, being immersed in data analysis, and spending time solving technical challenges in experiments. I love teaching and spend time discussing with the students.

New project:

Sharp wave-ripples (SPW-R) in hippocampus. Hippocampus is a gate way for memory storage. SPW-R is large population event, involving synchronized activation 10% – 18% of the neurons (~100,000). A central question is how memory is consolidated during the SPW-R evnets. We hypothesize that memory traces are stored and replayed in a distributed manner, e.g., each memory element is represented by small modifications of a large number of synapses. We use brain slices to study the ripple patterns, to answer whether the highly diverse ripple patterns are correlated with memory traces stored in the system.