Dr. Minghong Ma

Biography

Minghong Ma's research focuses on how the brain perceives and responds to sensory stimuli, especially in health and disease contexts. Using mouse models that allow for the exploration of experimentally accessible neural circuits, his work investigates well-characterized behaviors. Rodent behavior is heavily influenced by olfactory cues, which encompass activities such as locating food, communicating with conspecifics, and avoiding danger. The olfactory sensory neurons in the nose initiate odor detection and convey information to the olfactory bulb, from where it is relayed to both cortical and subcortical brain regions. Additionally, olfactory sensory neurons act as mechanical sensors, integrating nasal breathing signals with odor information for the brain. Ma’s current research examines the connections between the olfactory system and non-olfactory regions, explores the mind-body interactions mediated by respiration and behavioral states, investigates the role of sniffing in sensory salience representation, studies neural mechanisms that underlie inter-brain synchrony in socially interacting mice, and looks at the effects of clinically relevant drugs on human neocortical and hippocampal neurons through acute brain slices. His lab employs a range of advanced techniques such as patch-seq analysis, in vivo electrophysiology, and optogenetics to advance this research agenda.

Research Interests