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 publications

  1. Yannan Chen, Shradha Chauhan, Cheng Gong, Hannah Dayton, et al. 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, et al. 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, 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.” Journal of Neuroendocrinology 37 (4), e13490.

    5. * denotes co-first author

What am I interested in

Research, movies, games, sports etc.

  • Watching soccer games. Team: Barcelona, Argentina, Spain. Player: Messi.
  • Playing tennis with my wife (amateur level, but we enjoy it a lot!)
  • Bakery, cooking with my wife. We are developing a tasting menu that features Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian, and French cuisines.