WESLEY CHARLES SMITH, PHD

HONORS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCHER, ON THE DEAN'S LIST AT THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA

2008-2010

Research advisor: Daniel F. Eberl

• Designed an acoustic trauma chamber, made electrophysiological recordings in Drosophila antennae, uncovered hidden auditory phenotypes in flies heterozygous for a mutant ATPase, and was the first to reveal acoustic trauma in invertebrates

• Generated new fly lines with fluorescent reporters in mitochondria

NEUROSCIENCE PHD STUDENT AT UCLA

2010-2012

Research advisor: Jin Hyung Lee

• Established a novel optogenetic model of epilepsy in vivo at the whole-brain circuit level using optogenetic fMRI (ofMRI) and EEG coupled to a novel behavioral monitoring set up in rats

• Discovered reproducible, frequency-dependent neural networks recruited by dorsal and intermediate hippocampal optogenetic stimulation of pyramidal neurons, which results in different seizure types

Rotation Research      

• Learned whole-cell patch clamp recording techniques in Felix Schweizer’s laboratory

• Learned 2-photon microscopy techniques in Joshua Trachtenberg’s laboratory

NEUROSCIENCE PHD STUDENT AND DOCTORAL CANDIDATE AT UCLA

2012-2018

Research advisor: Sotiris C. Masmanidis

• Assembled and used slice electrophysiology and optogenetics setup to test Ai32 ChR2 mouse line

• Piloted a novel 1D head-fixed VR CPP test for use with natural and drug rewards, as well as developed an odor preference paradigm for head-fixed mice that uses pupillometry to test for learned associations and arousal based on cocaine-odor conditioning

• Performed striatal retrograde tracing studies to inform novel electrode array design

• Used custom 512 channel multiregion extracellular silicon probes to simultaneously record prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum in vivo, demonstrating that proportion of frontostriatal inhibition and degree of gamma coherence correlates to drug-cue induced behavioral arousal  

• Developed new code toolkits to assess critical neural dynamics in vivo with custom silicon nanoprobe arrays as well as a novel method to quantify critical tuning in the cortex, showing criticality is enhanced in early cocaine abstinence and predicts cue-induced behavioral arousal, and that the system complexity in the cortex and striatum is decoupled from criticality during early abstinence but is coupled in drug-naïve mice

POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCHER

2018-Present

Research advisor: Mayank Mehta 

Continued work at UCLA to further the usage of silicon probes in chronic settings. More to come!​