Congrats to Dr. Ho!

Congratulations to Chunta Ho, PhD for successfully defending his doctoral thesis! Chunta’s work greatly improved our understanding of how the homeostatic chemokine CXCL12 regulates cortical dendritic spines. His work enhanced the technical capacity of the lab with new live-imaging techniques for dendritic spines and the post-synaptic density protein PSD-95, which allowed for real-time imaging in vitro and in vivo during pharmacological treatments. He also found evidence that CXCL12 regulates dendritic spine clustering, a form of functional plasticity based on anatomical groups of spines, in collaboration with a bioinformatics faculty member. Chunta’s work opens the door to new cutting-edge studies on how CXCL12 regulates structural network properties, and how these translate to neuronal network activity over time, which may help uncover new therapeutic targets for neurologic disorders.