Jacque Ip
School of Biomedical Sciences and Gerald Choa Neuroscience Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Speaker Information
Jacque IpSchool of Biomedical Sciences and Gerald Choa Neuroscience Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong |
GCNI Symposium "Windows on the Brain" Speaker Information |
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Dr. Jacque Pak Kan Ip (葉栢勤) obtained his B.Sc. in Biochemistry from the University of Sydney with first class honours and university medal, and then received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Dr. Ip received further post-doctoral training at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Ip has devoted his research to investigate the mechanisms of locally coordinated and feedback plasticity in rodent visual cortex, and examine how such mechanistic defects contributes to neurological disorder through the use of multidisciplinary approaches. His long-term goal is to apply multidisciplinary neurotechnology to probe brain function in health and disease. His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Science, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Review Neuroscience, Molecular Psychiatry, and the Journal of Neuroscience. He received a number of awards including the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO) Rita Levi-Montalcini Research fellowship, Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) Long-Term fellowship, and Hong Kong Research Grant Council Early Career Award. Dr. Ip also plays active roles in several organizations including The Asian Pacific Society for Neurochemistry (APSN), IBRO Early Career Committee and ALBA Network to promote trainee development as well as diversity in neuroscience.
The formation of memories requires the brain to encode, store, and retrieve information. This seemingly linear process involves different brain subregions to act in concert for memory formation. Spatial navigation—more precisely, spatial learning and memory—is widely used as a model to understand the computations performed by the hippocampus during episodic memory. The hippocampus is located within the medial temporal lobe and serves crucial roles in spatial navigation and episodic memory. Meanwhile, learning is the process whereby an organism attains knowledge or skills through experience. It is a dynamic process that includes forming neural representations of novel information that are first stored for short-term access and subsequently stabilized into long-term memory through the process of consolidation. As the major output subregion of the hippocampus, the cornu ammonis 1 (CA1) is essential for integrating diverse information, including contextual and task-relevant information, and participating in various learning and memory processes. In particular, the dorsal CA1 (dCA1) is a key hippocampal subregion that encodes the organism's location in space and time, and links specific behavioral events to the spatiotemporal framework. With the recent development of trans-synaptic tracing technology and whole-brain imaging, it is now possible to identify and examine novel or understudied circuitry. Therefore, we propose to identify novel or understudied brain regions that target the dCA1 and dissect their functional importance by performing cell-type-specific tracing in combination with in vivo miniscope imaging.