EPSCoR Research Fellows: NSF: Visualizing neuronal plasticity in vivo at high resolution

This Research Infrastructure Improvement (RII) EPSCoR Research Fellows project provides a fellowship to an Assistant Professor and training for a graduate student or postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. This work is conducted in collaboration with Dr. Guanghan Meng at the University of California, Berkeley. Through the fellowship, the PI will learn and apply advanced imaging methods to watch how nerve cells in the living eye change over time. The project will address how age and cell type shape the ability of visual nerve cells to remodel their connections during development and disease-related disruption. This work will use neuroscience, vision science, optical imaging, genetics, and computational analysis to study neural plasticity in the retina, a highly accessible part of the central nervous system. The award will strengthen research infrastructure in Alabama by building expertise in high-resolution live imaging, expanding training opportunities for students, and supporting future shared imaging resources that can benefit vision science, neuroscience, and biomedical research. This project will establish and apply longitudinal, high-resolution in vivo fluorescence imaging to define when and how retinal bipolar cell dendrites remodel in living mice. Its intellectual contribution will be to move the field of retinal plasticity beyond endpoint, snapshot-based studies toward trajectory-based rules that explain how plasticity is shaped by developmental stage and cell type at the first visual synapse. In collaboration with the Meng laboratory, the project will optimize a two-photon retinal imaging platform with three-dimensional resolution sufficient to visualize individual synaptic structures while maintaining high imaging speed. The team will image fluorescently labeled ON and OFF bipolar cells in normal and retinal disease mouse models across defined developmental windows followed by quantitative analyses on dendritic territory and complexity to reveal remodeling onset, kinetics, and spatial coordination. The fellowship will strengthen research infrastructure by advancing faculty expertise in in vivo retinal imaging, training a graduate student in imaging and computational analysis, supporting curriculum development, establishing transferable protocols, and laying the groundwork for future shared imaging capability in Alabama. This project is supported by the EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement Program: EPSCoR Research Fellows (ERF). The ERF program supports early- and mid-career investigators in eligible jurisdictions to develop collaborations at the nation’s private, government or academic research institutions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.