Ariel Gilad is an assistant professor in the Department of Medical Neurobiology, Faculty of Medicine, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His interest in how the whole brain encodes cognitive processes led him to acquire a Ph.D. in neuroscience with Hamutal Slovin using wide-field voltage imaging of primary visual cortex in behaving monkeys. As a postdoctoral fellow, he continued to study cognitive processing across the whole mouse cortex with Fritjof Helmchen at the University of Zurich. He returned to Israel as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow and expanded his research beyond the cortex to study learning-related dynamics in the auditory thalamus with Adi Mizrahi.

Gilad’s lab studies how cognition is encoded in a brain-wide manner. After gaining insights into the brain-wide cognitive network in neurotypical mouse brains, the lab is now beginning to address cognitive networks in mouse models of neurodevelopmental conditions. The lab’s state-of-the-art techniques and novel approaches will enable insights into cognitive brain-wide dynamics to be gained at the individual level and are expected to help lead to breakthroughs in understanding of neurotypical development as well as what arises in atypical neurodevelopmental conditions.