SCSB Lunch Series with Dr. Chaoyi Zhang: Reading the social brain: volumetric functional ultrasound imaging in behaving marmosets
Simons Center Conference room, 46-6011, Room 46-6011, 43 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA
Date: Friday, November 6, 2026 Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm Location: Simons Center Conference room 46-6011. Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/96729184896 Speaker: Chaoyi Zhang, Ph.D. Affiliation: Postdoctoral Fellow, Guoping Feng Laboratory, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Yang Tan Collective, MIT Talk title: Reading the social brain: volumetric functional ultrasound imaging in behaving marmosets Abstract: Primate social brain engages distributed networks spanning prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, striatum, thalamus, and amygdala — circuits repeatedly implicated in autism and other neuropsychiatric disorders yet rarely observed at brain-wide scale in awake primate during genuine social interaction. The common marmoset is well suited to closing this gap: it is highly social, genetically tractable, and available as a transgenic model of autism risk genes. What has been missing is a way to record brain-wide activity while a marmoset behaves. I will present a functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) platform we developed for awake marmosets, in which a section of skull is replaced with an acoustically transparent implant, giving volumetric access to cortical and subcortical structures at…