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Alex Kwan received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Cornell University, where he worked in the optical microscopy laboratory of Watt Webb. Following his doctoral studies, he completed postdoctoral research as a Croucher Fellow studying neuroscience under Yang Dan at the University of California, Berkeley. Kwan became an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine before joining Cornell's faculty in 2022. His lab, the Kwan Lab, applies systems neuroscience and neuroengineering approaches to the study of mental health, developing optical imaging techniques to visualize neural structure and activity dynamics in awake mice. His team designs quantitative paradigms to characterize behavior, complementing imaging and behavioral experiments with molecular, electrophysiological, optical, and computational methods. Current efforts in the lab focus on understanding the action of psychiatric drugs in the brain, investigating how compounds like ketamine and serotonergic psychedelics may hold promise in treating depression. Kwan aims to uncover the therapeutic behavioral effects of these drugs by modifying the connectivity and functions of neural circuits, with the long-term goal of identifying effective and safe strategies for treating mental health conditions.
Department of Architecture