Who am I

I'm currently a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University in Sebastian Seung's Lab. I completed my PhD at Columbia University in Raju Tomer's Lab. My research focuses on connectomics, where we use high-throughput electron microscopy and petabytes-scale data processing tools to map the connectivity of densely packed neurons in brain tissue. This work aims to unravel the wiring diagrams and principles underlying brain computation. During my PhD, I specialized in tissue clearing, light sheet microscopy, and brain-wide mapping. With the recent paradigm shifting advances in microscopy and computational tools, we are now able to acquire the large volumes of brain wiring diagram which was impossible a decade ago.

What do I do

Mental and neurological disorders cause significant global disease burden, yet effective treatments are lacking. Whole brain mapping approaches offer a promising solution, but challenges remain in achieving uniform labeling and comparative data analysis. My work develops novel methods for uniform labeling, high-throughput imaging, and comparative analysis of large brain samples to understand the brain-wide impact of anti-depressant drug exposure.

My written footprints

Publications

  1. Yannan Chen, Shradha Chauhan, Cheng Gong, Hannah Dayton, Cong Xu, Estanislao Daniel De La Cruz, Yu-Young Wesley Tsai, Malika S Datta, Gorazd B Rosoklija, Andrew J Dwork, J John Mann, Maura Boldrini, Kam W Leong, Lars EP Dietrich, Raju Tomer. 2024. “Low-cost and scalable projected light-sheet microscopy for the high-resolution imaging of cleared tissue and living samples.” Nature Biomedical Engineering 1-15.
  2. Malika S. Datta*, Yannan Chen*, Shradha Chauhan, Jing Zhang, Estanislao Daniel De La Cruz, Cheng Gong, and Raju Tomer. 2023. “Whole-brain mapping reveals the divergent impact of ketamine on the dopamine system.” Cell reports 42 (12).
  3. M. Angeles Rabadan, Estanislao Daniel De La Cruz, Sneha B. Rao, Yannan Chen, Cheng Gong, Gregg Crabtree, Bin Xu, et al. 2022. “An in Vitro Model of Neuronal Ensembles.” Nature Communications 13 (1): 3340.
  4. Yifan Yao, Yannan Chen, Raju Tomer, Rae Silver. 2024. “Capillary connections between sensory circumventricular organs and adjacent parenchyma enable local volume transmission.” bioRxiv 2024.07.30.605849.
  5. Rao B Sneha, Francesco Brundu, Yannan Chen, Yan Sun, et al. 2023 “Aberrant pace of cortical neuron development in brain organoids from patients with 22q11. 2 deletion syndrome and schizophrenia.” bioRxiv 2023.10.04.557612.
  6. Kechun Wen, Yannan Chen, Xin Meng, Samantha Botros, Wenting Dai, Milan N. Stojanovic, Raju Tomer, and Qiao Lin. 2023. “A Microfluidic Dual-Aptamer Sandwich Assay for Rapid and Cost-Effective Detection of Recombinant Proteins.” Microchemical Journal 188 (May): 108454.
  7. Yannan Chen, Jing Zhang, Estanislao Daniel De La Cruz, Shradha Chauhan, Cheng Gong, Malika S. Datta,…, and Raju Tomer. 2023. “Rapid, uniform labeling of large intact biological samples for quantitative mapping”. In final preparations.

    8. * denotes co-first author