Zoé Christenson Wick

Reunion with past and present Cai lab & Shuman lab members (and collaborators). Spending time with you guys is easily the best part of my job.

@tristanshuman.bsky.social
@sinaibrain.bsky.social
@sfn.org

In #SanDiego for @sfn.org's #SfN2025? The #ShumanLab's Paul Philipsberg & @zoechristensonwick.bsky.social are! CATCH UP with them & LEARN ABOUT their EXCITING WORK! #FriedmanBrainInstitute #NashNeuroscience #FBIatSfN CHECK OUT the #FBIatSfN Itinerary ➡️ files.constantcontact.com/d41ee115401/...

🧠 The Cai Lab will be at #SfN25!

Be sure to stop by the poster sessions to check out Hailey's work on decision-making, @zachtpennington.bsky.social's work on stress, @zoechristensonwick.bsky.social's work on seizures, Alexa's work on cocaine seeking, and Sandra's work on context representations 🤓

We're brewing up some Halloween fun in the Cai & Shuman Labs! ⚗️🎃

Just look at all the creativity everyone poured into their costumes! We have the coolest crew 👩‍🔬🧪

Interested in studying how neural circuits underlying mental health disorders are shaped by experience (e.g., stress)? Also interested in being trained by an amazing, thoughtful, and rigorous scientist? Also interested in living in a beautiful Canadian city? See below!

Hooray!!!! Huge congratulations Zach!!!

We're looking forward to the first annual New York Memory Hub conference later this week! Can't wait for all the talks and discussion about all things learning and memory 🧠

Amazing work as usual Abhilasha! 🤩

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🚨 New preprint! 🚨

Excited and proud (& a little nervous 😅) to share our latest work on the importance of #theta-timescale spiking during #locomotion in #learning. If you care about how organisms learn, buckle up. 🧵👇

📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
💻 code + data 🔗 below 🤩

#neuroskyence

Huge congratulations to the new cohort of Fellows-to-Faculty awardees!! 👏

Simons Foundation Announces Recipients of 2025 Fellows-to-Faculty Awards The Simons Foundation is pleased to announce the 2025 class of Fellows-to-Faculty Fellows.

Announcing our 9 new Fellows-to-Faculty Fellows! These awards help senior postdoctoral researchers with fresh perspectives on autism & neuroscience transition to tenure-track faculty positions: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/simons-foundation-announces-recipients-of-2025-fellows-to-faculty-awards/

Thank you Bree! Hope you’re doing well

Congratulations!!!! Such a huge milestone, it’s time to celebrate!! Also how are we still in perfect synch with these things, even after 6 years 😂

BiPOLES really came in clutch at exactly the right moment for us. Thank you for making it available!

Amazing! Congratulation Zoe 💪🥳this great application of #BiPOLES and a really cool paper👍

Check out new work from our lab! We developed a new way to directly control the precise timing of interneurons during behavior and found that theta phase locking is a causal mediator of seizure susceptibility in both healthy and epileptic mice.

Couldn't have done it without your help 😍

This is also probably the moment to share that I am officially on the job market! If you are looking to add a neuroscientist with expertise in hippocampal physiology (especially interneurons), oscillations, epilepsy, and aging to your dept hit me up! I have funding!
(www.zoechristensonwickphd.com)

And a very special shout out to my co-first author Paul Philipsberg. He doesn’t internet, but he’s a phenomenal grad student in the lab and the literal wizard behind PhaSER. If you use PhaSER (github.com/ShumanLab/Ph...), you have him to thank!

And it all couldn’t have happened without the incredible team of people that worked on this over the last 6 years. Words cannot convey how amazing a group this is.

@susieyufeng.bsky.social @laurenmvetere.bsky.social @denisejcai.bsky.social @tristanshuman.bsky.social

Side note: if you can find an opto-tagged SOM+ cell in the epileptic dentate, I will personally give you $5. 💰

There are tons of cool nuggets in this preprint: how to do pilo in transgenic mice (it’s complicated!), really interesting sex differences in epilepsy, why stimulation alone doesn’t work to shift phase locking, etc etc…

Finally, we tested if altered PV+ phase locking was sufficient to induce seizure susceptibility in otherwise healthy animals, by shifting PV+ spiking to the peak of theta… And it was!

Then we applied this manipulation to test if, in epilepsy, restoring PV+ interneuron spiking to the trough of theta could reduce seizure susceptibility. It did!

(This is the part of the paper where I had to summarize many. many. many. years of work in 2 sentences):

PhaSER works best to shift the phase locking of interneurons when coupled with bidirectional manipulations (thank you, BiPOLES!!!) 👏 @simwieg.bsky.social @johvierock.bsky.social

Now, there’s a long list of disorders with altered phase locking. But finding the causal role of this change in spike timing was impossible due to limitations in technology.

Enter, 〰️PhaSER 〰️: a closed-loop system that delivers phase-locked manipulations to ongoing oscillations.

.@tristanshuman.bsky.social and @susieyufeng.bsky.social previously showed that DG interneurons have dramatically altered theta phase locking in epilepsy. Not only did we replicate this (2x!), we found that PV+ interneurons specifically showed theta phase locking deficits in epilepsy.

But let’s start from the beginning.

First: phase locking profiles in dentate PV+ and SOM+ cells in healthy mice. PV+ cells were highly coupled to the theta trough while SOM+ interneurons showed more widely distributed spiking. (I think this is really cool and I have theories...)

Interneuron theta phase locking controls seizure susceptibility The timing of neuronal activity is highly precise and often organized by brain-wide oscillations. Many neurons modulate their firing rates at specific phases of theta (known as theta phase locking), c...

Link here:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨New preprint alert🚨
We used closed-loop optogenetics to causally test the importance of inhibitory spike timing in network function and found that manipulating PV+ cell theta phase locking in the dentate gyrus can shift seizure susceptibility (both ways!)