People

Meet the Principal Investigator

Jun Yamamoto, PhD

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.

current members

Post-docs

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Shogo Takamiya, Ph.D.

Dr. Takamiya earned his B.A. in psychology and Ph.D. in neuroscience from Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. He has played badminton since he was a junior high school student.
He is interested in learning and memory mechanism and trying to understand it by combining behavioral memory tasks (experimental psychology) with large-scale recording of neural activity in hippocampus and other cortical regions from freely moving animals (in vivo electrophysiology).
He joined Yamamoto lab as a visiting researcher in 2022 before he got his Ph.D. degree. From 2023, he began his research as a post-doc.

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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.

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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.

Co-mentoring Post-doc

Yoshiyuki Ohmura, M.D., Ph.D. (with Dr. Takashi Kitamura)

Faculty Collaborators

Dr. Takashi Kitamura, Ph.D. (Psychiatry)

Dr. Sachie Ogawa, Ph.D. (Psychiatry)

Dr. Carol Tamminga, M.D. (Psychiatry)

Dr. Daniel Scott, Ph.D. (Psychiatry)

Dr. Joachim Herz, M.D., Ph.D. (Molecular Genetics)

Dr. Murat Durakoglugil, M.D., Ph.D. (Molecular Genetics)

Alumni

Pietro Scaduto, Ph.D. (a short term trainee from UTMB)