DEPARTMENT OF NEUROBIOLOGY

Specializations

Regions(s): Systems Neuroscience; Brain and Behavior

Research interest(s): Motor system function; Behavior quantification

Research Summary

Our work aims to build mechanistic understanding of how the nervous system gives rise to movement. The patterns of muscle activation that drive movement reflect an interplay between neuronal circuits in the spinal cord and an array of brain regions that comprise the motor system. Yet how this interplay gives rise to the remarkable complexity, agility and precision of mammalian movement is poorly understood. This ambiguity stems largely from the historical challenge of characterizing interactions between neuronal populations in the motor system over the short timescale (milliseconds) on which the activity of muscles must be coordinated during movement.

Fortunately, a wealth of recent technical advances newly enable such characterization. Thanks to emerging physiological methods, we can now comprehensively assess activity across large motor system populations and observe correlations in activity between populations, which are important indicators of how populations interact. With new genetic tools, neural activity measurement and perturbation can be targeted to distinct subpopulations of neurons, which may represent the elemental units of motor system operation. And rapidly evolving data science methods can identify prominent patterns and salient effects in the measured activities of populations of neurons and muscles.

My lab uses these techniques to address questions like the following:

• How do disparate motor system populations conspire to generate skilled motor behaviors?
• How does motor cortical output engage spinal circuits to enable movement complexity and agility?
• What are the most appropriate elemental functional units with which to describe mechanisms of motor system operation?

Selected Publications

• Warriner, C.L., Fageiry, S., Saxena, S., Costa, R.M. and Miri, A. (2022) "Motor cortical influence relies on task-specific activity covariation." Cell Reports 40(13):111427.
• Miri, A.*, Bhasin, J.*, Aksay, E., Goldman, M.S., Tank, D.W. (2022) “Oculomotor plant and neural dynamics suggest gaze control requires integration on distributed timescales." Journal of Physiology 600(16):3837-3863
• Warriner, C.L., Fageiry, S.K., Carmona, L.M., Miri, A. (2020) “Towards Cell and Subtype Resolved Functional Organization: Mouse as a Model for the Cortical Control of Movement.” Neuroscience 450:151-160
• Miri, A., Warriner, C.L., Seely, J.S., Elsayed, G.F., Cunningham, J.P., Churchland, M.M., Jessell, T.M. (2017) Behaviorally-selective engagement of short-latency effector pathways by motor cortex. Neuron 95(3):683-696
• Machado, T.A., Pnevmatikakis, E., Paninski, L., Jessell, T.M., Miri, A. (2015) Primacy of flexor locomotor pattern revealed by ancestral reversion of motor neuron identity. Cell 162(2):338-50.
• Miri, A., Azim, E., Jessell, T.M. (2013) Edging toward entelechy in motor control. Neuron 80(3):827-34.
• Miri, A., Daie, K., Arrenberg, A.B., Baier, H., Aksay, E., Tank, D.W. (2011) Spatial gradients and multidimensional dynamics in a neural integrator circuit. Nature Neuroscience 14(9):1150-1159.
• Miri, A., Daie, K., Burdine, R.D., Aksay, E., Tank, D.W. (2011) Regression-based identification of behavior-encoding neurons during large scale optical imaging of neural activity at cellular resolution. Journal of Neurophysiology 105(2):964-980.

Selected Honors/Awards

• 2020 NIH Director's New Innovator Award
• 2020 Sloan Research Fellowship, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
• 2019 Searle Scholar Award, Kinship Foundation
• 2018 Whitehall Research Grant Award, Whitehall Foundation
• 2017 Allen Brain Institute Next Generation Leadership Council
• 2013-2016 Helen Hay Whitney Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship
• 2010 Princeton University Graduate Teaching Award in Neuroscience
• 2006-2010 National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship
• 2002 Phi Beta Kappa