Barcoded connectomics across vertebrates

2nd October 2025

Timing : 1 pm ET

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For a list of all talks at the NanoBio seminar Series Fall'25, see here

We ask how new brain regions and cell types form in evolution, how they connect to the rest of the brain, and what this tells us about the organizing principles and function of the vertebrate brain. To do so, we employ spatial transcriptomics across widely divergent vertebrate species during development, and develop new barcoding technologies to map neuronal connectivity at single-cell resolution in high throughput by converting anatomy into a sequencing problem. Here we present sequencing-based neuroanatomical tracing tools for species ranging from amphibians to monkeys, and apply them to understand cerebellar evolution and function.

Dr. Justus Kebschull
Assistant Professor

Justus grew up in Germany and received his BA and MSci from the University of Cambridge, UK in 2011. He pursued his PhD in Tony Zador’s lab at CSHL 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 coming to JHU in 2021. He has won a Klingenstein-Simons, Packard and Sloan Fellowships for his work, as well as the Pershing Square MIND prize and a NIDA Avenir award.