Roarke Horstmeyer

Roarke Horstmeyer from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena is conducting research on bioimaging and neurophotonics together with Benjamin Judkewitz from the Neurocure Cluster of Excellence. The lab wants to develop new approaches to use suitable imaging techniques and electrophysiology to investigate circuits in the brain that were previously inaccessible using non-invasive methods.

More about Roarke Horstmeyer

Illustration mit Fragezeichen in den Farben der Einstein Stiftung

09/17/2018

"What do you do first thing in the morning when you arrive at your workplace, and why?" All questions & answers by Roarke Horstmeyer.

06/21/2016

"It is a special moment to be able to see really deep into the brain at a really nice resolution that perhaps no one has achieved before." Roarke Horstmeyer talks about his research as an Einstein International Postdoctoral Fellow at the Judkewitz Lab.

My project

„Light is playing an increasingly important role as a tool in experimental neuroscience. Fluorescent proteins are routinely used to illuminate neurons of interest. And with tools from the new research field of optogenetics, it is now also possible to activate or deactivate individual neurons, simply by focusing light onto them. However, as anyone who has held a flashlight up to their hand might know, light scatters significantly as it passes through tissue. Thus, many of the current optical tools used in experimental neuroscience operate only on the top layers of the brain, since it is challenging to focus light beneath its surface. My research project aims to precisely control light deeper within the brain. We use new optical designs and processing algorithms to undo the effects of optical scattering, in an attempt to resolve living neurons in brain areas that have so far been hidden from our view.“

More about Roarke Horstmeyer

Einstein Questionnaire: Roarke Horstmeyer

Meeting Einstein: Roarke Horstmeyer

My project