The Nabavi lab focuses on understanding how synaptic plasticity relates to behavioral plasticity (learning and memory formation) and how these memories are integrated into the existing network (cellular and systems consolidation) at the synaptic and circuit levels. 

Synaptic plasticity remains an (almost) indisputable candidate for learning and memory. For this reason, a large body of works is devoted to the mechanisms underlying plasticity, with the majority of these works take in vitro preparation as their working model. However, many behavioral phenomena either cannot be studied in slice preparation or are inconsistent with the findings. The main theme of our research is to understand the rules that govern synaptic plasticity in vivo, in respect to associative learning. We will give a particular emphasize to the types of associative learnings (and forgetting!) that cannot be reconciled with the currents models that are inspired by in vitro studies. Our investigation is confined between synaptic and circuit levels. For the behavioral model, we take a reductionist approach, that is we study only the associative learnings that can be monitored and manipulated at the cellular and synaptic scales. Although we remain focused at the level of the questions, we do not confine ourselves to a particular set of techniques. In vitro and in vivo electrophysiology as well as in vitro and in vivo imaging and brain-circuit mapping will be indispensable to our investigation.