Meet the Principal Investigator
Jun Yamamoto, Ph.D.
Dr. Yamamoto earned his undergraduate, Master's, and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Keio University in Tokyo, Japan. Throughout his Ph.D. studies, he was profoundly inspired by the research of Dr. Matt Wilson from MIT, leading him to pivot to Computational and Systems Neuroscience. Following his Ph.D., Dr. Yamamoto undertook postdoctoral training at The University of Strasbourg Medical School (also known as Louis Pasteur University) in France, and then at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was mentored by Dr. Guy Sandner until 2000 and Dr. Matt Wilson until 2008. Subsequently, he contributed as a Research Scientist in the Tonegawa lab at MIT until the beginning of 2017.
In 2017, Dr. Yamamoto began his position at the UT Southwestern Medical Center, serving as an Assistant Professor in the Psychiatry Neuroscience department. He employs Systems Neuroscience approaches to address memory-related conditions like Schizophrenia and Alzheimer's Disease through the use of animal models.
Muthumeenakshi Subramanian, Ph.D.
Muthu began her scientific journey in neuroengineering in India where she got her B.E in biomedical engineering from Anna University in 2016. She moved to the US in 2017 to continue her studies in biomedical engineering and started working in Dr. Dominique Durand's lab at Case Western Reserve University. She earned a Ph.D. in 2023 for her work on the role of electric fields in the propagation and control of neural activity, particularly theta oscillations and epileptic activity. On completion of her graduate studies, she joined Dr. Yamamoto's lab as a post-doctoral researcher where she is currently exploring her interest in artificial intelligence tools to study hypersynchronous events in the hippocampus in psychosis and memory-related disorders. She has recently published a Molecular Psychiatry paper in collaboration with the Tamminga laboratory.
Kazushi Fukumasu, Ph.D.
In 2018, Dr. Fukumasu graduated from The Department of Physics in The University of Tokyo (Univ. Tokyo), Tokyo, Japan. During his undergraduate, he was impressed by the fact that theories and techniques in physics have been contributing to the recent rapid progress in neuroscience, and decided to enter Dr. Akinao Nose’s laboratory in Univ. Tokyo to pursue neuronal basis of behavioral pattern generation with calcium imaging. By this study, He earned his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in 2020 and 2023, respectively. Following his Ph.D., He started his postdoctoral research at the UT Southwestern Medical Center, and is addressing the mechanism of memory update based on Systems Neuroscience.
Neehar Gigimaji,BS
Neehar is a visiting graduate student from the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), with a strong enthusiasm for systems neuroscience and a keen interest in memory encoding and retrieval using rodent models. He has demonstrated deep knowledge of hippocampal memory systems and is eager to uncover the mechanisms underlying hippocampal–cortical interactions that support working memory. He has developed data analysis pipelines that have significantly accelerated our research and shown a strong commitment to the analytical aspects of our work. Neehar is highly collaborative, always willing to support lab members, and takes initiative in maintaining a clean and organized work environment to facilitate effective research.