Affiliations
Postdoctoral Fellow, Monell Chemical Senses Center
Education
Ph.D., Programs in Neuroscience, Seoul National University
Laboratory Of
Dr. Amber Alhadeff
Research Summary
My research is in brain-body physiology, the study of how the body’s peripheral organs communicate with the brain and how the brain acts back on the body in return. We notice this conversation only when it speaks loudly, through thirst or hunger, but most of the time it runs quietly and beneath awareness. I came to these questions as much through building tools as through biology. During my doctoral work I built an imaging platform that renders whole organs transparent and measures them across the many spatial scales that flat tissue sections cannot capture. I used it to uncover how drinking relieves thirst within seconds, long before any water is absorbed, tracing sensory signals from the pharynx to the brain.
At Monell I ask how the gut signals its nutrient state to the brain. A single organ is served by two sensory routes, one through the vagus nerve and one through the spinal cord, and why the body maintains both remains unresolved. I ask how these routes divide the labor of monitoring a meal, how the brainstem turns their signals into commands that act back on the internal organs, and how the same pathways report discomfort and pain arising from within the viscera, including when a meal itself becomes the source of that distress. To address these questions, I combine imaging of neural activity in awake animals, targeted manipulation of defined pathways, whole-organ tissue clearing, and measurements of physiology and behavior. This work aims to reveal how the body’s internal signals reach the brain and are interpreted there and how their disruption contributes to obesity, diabetes, and visceral pain.
Keywords
brain-body physiology, interoception, nutrient sensing, visceral pain, vagal and spinal pathways, in vivo calcium imaging, tissue clearing and volumetric imaging, obesity and metabolic disease
Representative Publications
Pac J*, Koo DJ*, Cho H, Jung D, Choi MH, Choi Y, Kim B, Park JU, Kim SY, Lee Y. Three-dimensional imaging and analysis of pathological tissue samples with de novo generation of citrate-based fluorophores. Science Advances. 2022;8(46):eadd9419.
Jung S, Lee M, Kim DY, Son C, Ahn BH, Heo G, Park J, Kim M, Park HE, Koo DJ, Park JH. A forebrain neural substrate for behavioral thermoregulation. Neuron. 2022;110(2):266-279.
Cho AN, Jin Y, An Y, Kim J, Choi YS, Lee JS, Kim J, Choi WY, Koo DJ, Yu W, Chang GE. Microfluidic device with brain extracellular matrix promotes structural and functional maturation of human brain organoids. Nature Communications. 2021;12(1):4730.
Lee S*, Kim S*, Koo DJ*, Yu J, Cho H, Lee H, Song JM, Kim SY, Min DH, Jeon NL. 3D microfluidic platform and tumor vascular mapping for evaluating anti-angiogenic RNAi-based nanomedicine. ACS Nano. 2021;15(1):338-350.
Koo DJ*, Choi J*, Ahn M, Ahn BH, Min DH, Kim SY. Large-scale 3D optical mapping and quantitative analysis of nanoparticle distribution in tumor vascular microenvironment. Bioconjugate Chemistry. 2020;31(7):1784-1794.
* indicates equal contribution.
