Daniel Dombeck, Ph.D.

Daniel Dombeck researches the cellular and circuit brain mechanisms underlying the ability of mammals to navigate in their environments and find their way to specific destinations. To accomplish this, his lab develops and applies novel optical techniques to perform cellular and subcellular resolution imaging and manipulation of neuronal activity in mice navigating in virtual reality environments, with a focus on understanding the navigation circuitry located in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. By understanding the navigation circuitry, his research aims to extract general principles about neuronal population dynamics in behaving mammals. Daniel received his BSc in physics at The University of Illinois and his PhD in physics at Cornell University. He carried out postdoctoral research at Princeton University in the Department of Molecular Biology and The Princeton Neuroscience Institute. Since starting his lab at Northwestern University in 2011, he was named a Chicago Biomedical Consortium Junior Investigator, a Klingenstein Fellow and a McKnight Foundation Scholar. He is the associate director of the Northwestern University Interdepartmental Neuroscience graduate program and the director of the NIMH Neurobiology of Information Storage Training Grant. Research from the Dombeck lab has been published in high profile journals such as Nature, Science, Neuron, and Nature Neuroscience and their work has been funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, Nation Science Foundation MJ Fox Foundation, and the Whitehall Foundation.