Doctoral Candidate
BA with honors in Philosophy – Neuroscience – Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis
Claire McKinnon is a PhD student in the Committee on Computational Neuroscience. Her research interests involve understanding the systems level mechanisms that facilitate communication between cortical areas. For her doctoral thesis she uses DREADDs and optogenetics to selectively suppress both the direct and transthalamic pathways connecting primary and secondary visual cortex. By combining these manipulations with 2-photon calcium imaging of large populations of cortical neurons, she is able to investigate the relative contribution of each pathway to neuronal responses at both the individual neuron and systems level.