Dr. Kannan is an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota and a member of the Medical Discovery Team on Optical Imaging and Brain Science.

Having completed her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry in Chennai, India, Madhu Kannan went on to pursue a master’s in Molecular Genetics at the University of Leicester, UK. She then obtained a Ph.D. in Neurophysiology at the Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine, in Germany. During her postdoctoral work, in the lab of Dr. Mike Higley at Yale School of Medicine, CT, she studied the mechanisms of experience-dependent inhibitory synaptic plasticity using electrophysiology and optogenetics. She subsequently joined the lab of Dr. Vincent Pieribone, for a second postdoc, where she found her calling at the intersection of genetic engineering and neuroscience. Dr. Kannan created a suite of mutually compatible recombinant voltage indicators and used them to perform some of the first recordings, with millisecond resolution, of the correlated dynamics of genetically distinct neuron types in cortical microcircuits in behaving rodents.

Dr. Kannan’s research program will examine the synergistic dynamics of targeted cortical neurons in cognitive function using multi-population voltage imaging during attention paradigms adapted from primates. The Kannan lab will further combine this approach with targeted gene perturbation to understand the contribution of risk genes to impaired circuit function, which may in turn contribute to the cognitive deficits in psychiatric illnesses.