Xin Yu studied Neuroscience and Biophysics at New York University, USA. During his Ph.D. training in Dan Turnbull’s lab, he implemented Manganese-enhanced MRI to study the auditory midbrain plasticity and mid-hindbrain development. Meanwhile, he was trained by Dan Sanes to target the inferior colliculus and collaborated with Rodolfo Llinas’s lab to trace inferior olive with in vivo electrophysiology and Manganese-enhanced MRI (MEMRI). After obtained his Ph.D. in 2007, he moved to Bethesda and worked as a research fellow in Alan Koretsky’s lab in the National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), National Institutes of Health (NIH).  He combined MEMRI and BOLD-fMRI with electrophysiological recordings to study the system-to-synaptic brain plasticity. Using high-field fMRI (11.7T scanner), he made a significant effort to push the spatiotemporal limit of fMRI so as to better understand the neurovascular coupling mechanism of fMRI.  In 2014, he moved to Germany and build a  Translational Neuroimaging and Neural Control research group at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. The group specializes in developing advanced fMRI methods under high field (14T for animals, and 9.4T for humans) and implementing optogenetics and fiber-optic mediated calcium recording methods to build up multi-modal fMRI platform to study different brain states (arousal, anesthetized, and sleep). His group also focuses on investigating the neurovascular dynamic changes underlying the coma induction and reemergence in rodent models. In 2018, Dr. Yu moves to Martinos Center and serves as the Director of the Small Animal MR Scanning Facility.

Education

PhD in Biophysics, Physiology, and Neuroscience, New York University

Select Publications

1.      Drew PJ, Mateo C, Turner KL, Yu X, Kleinfeld D. Ultra-slow Oscillations in fMRI and Resting-State Connectivity: Neuronal and Vascular Contributions and Technical Confounds. Neuron. 2020 Aug 06. PMID: 32791040.

2.      Chen Y, Sobczak F, Pais-Roldán P, Schwarz C, Koretsky AP, Yu X. Mapping the Brain-Wide Network Effects by Optogenetic Activation of the Corpus Callosum. Cereb Cortex. 2020 Jun 18. PMID: 32556241.

3.      Pais-Roldán P, Takahashi K, Sobczak F, Chen Y, Zhao X, Zeng H, Jiang Y, Yu X. Indexing brain state-dependent pupil dynamics with simultaneous fMRI and optical fiber calcium recording. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2020 03 24; 117(12):6875-6882. PMID: 32139609.

Highlights

AMPC member (Annual Meeting of Program Committee) of ISMRM (2018-2021)                  

Junior Fellow of the ISMRM (2011)

Website

https://tnnc.mgh.harvard.edu/