Xu Lab

Research Center

Lab Members

The Xu Lab studies how the primate brain gives rise to social perception — how a network of cortical regions encodes faces and social scenes as information flows from sensory to prefrontal areas — and how this circuitry is altered in brain disorders.

At NKI, the lab records from macaques using electrophysiology, optical imaging, and functional MRI, asking how the brain builds a stable representation of other individuals, and it explores therapeutic approaches aimed at social-cognitive circuits.

A parallel effort develops the tools that make these questions tractable in nonhuman primates — genetically modified primate models, targeted neuromodulation, and large-scale recording technologies, including wireless electrophysiology and optical recordings.

Autism is one example of a condition that can be studied this way: work in genetic models such as the SHANK3 marmoset, carried out through collaboration with Robert Desimone and Guoping Feng at MIT, links specific circuit changes to social-cognitive difference. Because such circuits are disrupted across a range of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions — including autism and schizophrenia — this basic-science work connects directly to the mission of the Nathan Kline Institute.

Research directions

  • Neural circuits of social perception in behaving macaques.
  • Exploring therapeutic approaches targeting social-cognitive circuits.
  • Circuit signatures of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders in nonhuman primate models — with autism, the SHANK3 marmoset, as a leading example, in collaboration with MIT.
  • Technology development for primate systems neuroscience — genetically modified primate models, targeted neuromodulation, and large-scale recording technologies, including wireless electrophysiology and optical recordings.

Collaborators

Contact: Open to new collaborations — haoran.xu@nki.rfmh.org