Staff Profiles

Dan joined the Neural Coding group at the Allen Institute in 2014 under the direction of Clay Reid. He has contributed to the development and deployment of a pipeline for automated serial section collection and high throughput transmission electron microscopy. 

Prior to Joining the Allen Institute, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology under Ralf Sommer, where he headed a team that reconstructed synapse-level wiring in the anterior nervous system of the nematode Pristionchus pacificus. Their efforts led to identifying circuit architecture that act as a substrate for evolutionary differences in feeding behavior.

Dan earned his PhD at the University of California, Riverside in the lab of James Baldwin where he studied nematode anatomy and systematics of the poorly understood, but phylogenetically important Cephablobidae using a combination of molecular phylogeny, species descriptions based on light microscopy and scanning electron microscopy, and detailed anatomical studies of sensory anatomy using serial section transmission electron microscopy.

Research Interests

Dense, petascale descriptions of cortical anatomy at the ultrastructural level have the potential to lay the foundation for a new understanding of cortical circuit function and to help us translate knowledge gained in animal models to the human brain. I’ve been developing hardware and software for automated serial collection of ultrathin sections of brain tissue, working with our team on data acquisition, and developing methods for analyzing the resulting data. As we continue to scale tools for automated analysis of nervous system microanatomy, we’ll be able to rethink the kinds of questions we can ask about nervous system function and circuit level computation.

Expertise:

• Serial Section Transmission Electron Microscopy 
• Automation 
• Synaptic connectivity analysis 
• Evolutionary biology