Staci Sorensen
Associate Director, Neuroanatomy
biography
Staci Sorensen joined the Allen Institute in 2008 and she is currently the Associate Director of Neuroanatomy. She co-leads two large-scale pipeline projects: a mouse and human single-cell, multi-modality cell type characterization project, and a mouse Whole Neuron Morphology project. The cell type characterization project has evolved from traditional patch-clamp techniques to Patch-seq, which simultaneously captures morphology, electrophysiology, and transcriptomics from individual neurons, producing rich datasets that have contributed to the Allen Institute's public tools and data resources, including the Allen Toolkit, CellTypes database, and Patch-seq data explorer. The Whole Neuron Morphology project has produced a large dataset of whole-brain images with brainwide, sparse labeling of genetically-defined neuron populations, with more than 4,000 neurons now fully reconstructed. Before coming to the Allen Institute, she earned her doctoral degree in Neurobiology and Behavior working with Ed Rubel at the University of Washington, where her research focused on the role of neuronal input in the dynamic regulation of dendritic structure in the auditory system. She earned her B.S. in Psychology at the University of Washington.
research focus
I am a neuroscientist with an extensive background in neuroanatomy and morphology across a variety of sensory systems and species. My work is focused on understanding the diversity of cell types in the brain and how that diversity relates to connectivity and function. A central goal of my current projects is to build a comprehensive, multi-modal view of neuronal cell types in the mouse brain by integrating data across platforms, including Patch-seq, Whole Neuron Morphology-based single cell Projectomes, and Synaptic Connectomes. Local morphology serves as the key link across these approaches.
An essential part of this work has been developing an analysis framework to characterize the relationships among different cellular properties, including morphology, electrophysiology, transcriptomics, inter-areal and synaptic connectivity, to establish robust definitions of cell types.
