Justus Kebschull, PhD

Prize Winner

Position

Assistant Professor Biomedical Engineering

Prize

MIND Prize

Cohort

2023

Program

MIND Prize

Institution

Johns Hopkins University

Website

www.kebschull-lab.org

Project

How is the cerebellum connected to the rest of the brain? Using evolving barcodes to measure multisynaptic connectivity in health and disease

Vision

Our work leverages new technology development to tackle two fundamental open questions in biology: How did the brain evolve, and what does this teach us about how it works today? Precisely structured brain circuits, i.e., networks of connected neurons, control the behavior of all animals. Deviations from normal structure cause circuit dysfunction and disease. My lab works to understand the structure and function of vertebrate brain circuits using comparative connectomics and transcriptomics, the systematic comparison of connectivity and gene expression across species. In pursuit of this vision, my lab engineers high-resolution neuroanatomical and spatial transcriptomics tools for cross-species comparisons. We use these tools to define evolutionary mechanisms for increasing brain circuit function. Our work reveals fundamental principles of vertebrate brain architecture and establishes comparative connectomics and transcriptomics as key approaches for understanding the brain.

About

Dr. Kebschull grew up in Germany and received his BA and MSci in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge, UK in 2011. He pursued his Ph.D. in Tony Zador’s lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory where he developed DNA sequencing-based tools for brain mapping. In 2017 he joined Liqun Luo’s lab at Stanford University as a postdoctoral fellow, working on the evolution of the cerebellar nuclei, before starting his lab as an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University in 2021.

This project will illuminate the organization of brain-wide polysynaptic networks in health and disease. We will demonstrate this ability in cerebellar circuits, but our tools will impact research programs across the brain.

Our team is working to create detailed maps of how brain cells connect to and communicate with one another, with a focus on neurodegenerative disorders called spinocerebellar ataxias. To accomplish this, we use unique and diverse DNA barcodes as markers to track the movement of viruses through the brain. We then sequence the brain cells and barcodes contained within them, allowing us to reconstruct the pathways connecting individual brain cells.

"The MIND prize allows us to swing for the fences and develop a completely new approach to brain mapping that tackles the structure of the multi-synaptic cerebellar-cerebral loops head-on. We will understand the structure of these circuits both in healthy brains and in models of neurodegenerative diseases SCA3 and SCA6."