Bio

Dr. Jae-eun Kang Miller is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University. She is an affiliate member of the Columbia Zuckerman Institute and a member for the Columbia Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior.

Jae-eun moved from South Korea to the US for her graduate studies at Washington University. As a graduate student in David Holtzman’s lab, she discovered that the Alzheimer’s disease associated peptide amyloid beta is regulated by sleep. Many researchers have built on this initial discovery and it is now established that amyloid beta and other Alzheimer’s associated factors are cleared during sleep. A breakdown of this process may contribute to Alzheimer’s disease. As a graduate student, Jae-eun also discovered that amyloid beta is increased by stress, and this may explain the association between stress and Alzheimer’s disease.

During her postdoctoral studies, Jae-eun shifted to in vivo imaging approaches with the goal of ultimately applying this to Alzheimer’s disease. Working with Erik Herzog and Timothy Holy, Jae-eun used in vivo imaging to discovery how the olfactory system alters its responsiveness across the circadian cycle. She then moved to Rafael Yuste’s lab at Columbia and used pioneering approaches in 2-photon imaging and optogenetics to investigate the role of spontaneous activity in the primary visual cortex. Visual stimuli elicit activity of specific neuronal ensembles, and Jae-eun discovered that these same ensembles are active together spontaneously in the absence of any visual input. This suggests that sensory input recruits intrinsically generated cortical ensembles. This challenges the traditional view that cortical responses in primary sensory areas are built in a bottom up fashion from sensory input. Jae-eun went on to show how this spontaneous activity is altered over the course of learning.

As a principal investigator at Columbia, Jae-eun is now applying advanced approaches in in vivo imaging and circuit manipulation to investigate the pathophysiology of neuropsychiatric illnesses.