Page 20 - Rappaport Institute Magazine 2024

BRAIN SCIENCE
Ben Engelhard, PhD Assistant Professor of Neurobiology
PhD, 2015 – The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Investigating the neural circuits that underlie complex behavior including learning, decision making and social interactions.
The ability of the brain to produce the complex behavior evidenced by humans and other animals is one of the great mysteries in science. In our lab, we use experimental and computational approaches to try to understand the mechanisms by which this process take place. We focus on the brain’s dopamine system, which is critical for many behavioral and cognitive processes including reward- based learning, decision-making and social behavior. We use advanced imaging and neural manipulations techniques in mice couple with complex behavior assays to understand the activity patterns that lead to different behaviors and the computations that they represent. For example, we have shown that the activity of dopamine neurons during a complex, navigation-based decision- making task is radically different from the activity during learning of a simple cue-reward association, and have hypothesized that this represents a multidimensional learning signal that allows efficient learning of complex tasks. We are now testing different aspects of this hypothesis as well as its clinical implications.
Selected Publications
ˆ Willmore L*, Minerva AR*, Engelhard B*, Murugan M, McMannon B, Oak N, Thiberge SY, Peña CJ, Witten IB. (2023). Overlapping representations of food and social stimuli in mouse VTA dopamine neurons. Neuron 111 (22), 3541-3553. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2023.08.003
ˆ Engelhard B, Finkelstein J, Cox J, Fleming WT, Jang HJ, Ornelas S, Koay SA, Thiberge SY, Daw ND, Tank DW, Witten IB. (2019). Specialized coding of sensory, motor, and cognitive variables in VTA dopamine neurons. Nature 570: 509–513. doi: 10.1038/s41586-019-1261-9
ˆ Engelhard B, Ozeri N, Israel Z, Bergman H, Vaadia E. (2013). Inducing Gamma Oscillations and Precise Spike Synchrony by Operant Conditioning via Brain-Machine Interface. Nature 77 (2), 361-375.
Grants and Awards
2021 – The David and Inez Myers Career Advancement Chair in the Life Sciences Fellow
2021 – BBRF NARSAD Young investigator award
2023 – ERC starter grant 101117737 DopamineLearnLoops
2023 – Tech.AI vatat fund award
benengelhard@technion.ac.il
Ben Engelhard Lab
Complex activity of the brain’s dopamine system during learning in virtual reality. A) The behavioral setup. Mice navigate and make decisions in
a virtual world while being imaged with and advanced 2-photon microscope. B) Example trial in the accumulation of evidence task. Mice need to turn to the side where more cues appeared to receive reward. C) Psychometric curves showing the mice performance (n=20 mice). D) Surgical approach.
E) Example field of view and activity traces form single dopamine neurons. F) This task elicits multiple types of dopamine signals related to different behavioral features, a radically different picture than when learning a simple task.