Yamawaki is interested in understanding how neuronal circuits produce memory-guided movements. He spent his early career dissecting the local and long-range circuits in motor cortex, focusing on different classes of excitatory projection neurons. More recently, he studied the circuits of retrosplenial cortex (RSC), which are a major afferent of motor cortex and are implicated in contextual memory. Yamawaki showed RSC’s memory function is supported by unique circuits consisting of excitatory inputs from subiculum and thalamus and inhibitory inputs from CA1, with each input innervating distinct layers and dendritic regions of layer 5 pyramidal neurons in RSC. Main approach he uses to address these questions includes viral tracing and optogenetics combined with electrophysiology.

At the Department of Biomedicine, Yamawaki will continue to work on the hippocampal-RSC network and examine how these circuits encode and maintain the stress-related memories and are affected in various disease states. Then, he hope to look into the type of movements RSC memories have major implications.

For collaboration or knowledge exchange, please feel free to contact Naoki Yamawaki at naoki.yamawaki@biomed.au.dk.