Julian is a PhD student in the Neuroscience Graduate Program at UCSF. He received his B.A. in Computational Neuroscience from Harvard University (’24). During his undergraduate studies, he conducted research in Dr. Florian Engert’s lab, leveraging Serial Section EM data to test a neural circuit model of rheotaxis. Concurrently, he worked in Dr. Jeff Lichtman’s lab, assisting in their H01 project, which developed the first petascale high-resolution map of neural connections gathered from the human temporal cortex. He later worked at the Allen Institute with Dr. Stefan Mihalas, leading a team to extract cell assemblies from a cubic millimeter section of mouse V1 and reveal novel structural principles of cortical assembly delineation. In his graduate studies, Julian aims to understand how emotional value is written onto otherwise neutral cues, and how two reciprocally connected brain structures - the ventral hippocampus (vHPC) and the basolateral amygdala (BLA) - work in conjunction to divide the labor of valence coding.