About her PhD Project

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are neurodevelopmental conditions with diverse causes, leading to symptoms such as impaired social interaction, and repetitive behaviors. Individuals with ASD experience sensory processing and cognitive impairments, which may be linked to dysfunctions in the hippocampus—a brain region that organizes sensory information into cognitive maps to support memory and spatial navigation. A mismatch between external information and the local neural network dynamics in the hippocampus might result in incorrect mental representations, contributing to ASD symptoms. In mice, active exploration and experience-dependent plasticity begin around the end of the 2nd postnatal week (onset of vision and hearing). At this stage, hippocampal neurons start forming cognitive maps to represent the world in the form of neuronal sequences. We aim to determine when and how neuronal sequences are affected in ASD leading to a distort mental representation. To do so, we will combine 2-photon imaging with computational models to test how ASD-driven changes in excitation/inhibition balance and synaptic plasticity affect the formation, stability of neuronal sequences.