Casey Schneider-Mizell

Casey Schneider-Mizell is a Scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, where he is part of a team generating and analyzing millimeter-scale electron microscopy volumes of mammalian brain tissue. His research focuses on discovering the organizing principles of the nervous system by understanding the relationship between anatomy, function, and synaptic connectivity in large neuronal populations. In addition, he builds open source computational tools to allow members of the research community to address their own questions in the same rich datasets. Casey received his PhD in Physics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor under Dr. Len Sander, where he studied stochastic processes on complex networks. He did his postdoc in the lab of Dr. Albert Cardona, first at the Institute for Neuroinformatics (University and ETH Zürich) and then at HHMI Janelia Research Campus, where he used EM volumes to investigate the neural basis for behavioral choice in the Drosophila larva. He joined the Allen Institute for Brain Science in 2018 in order to scale up the analysis of EM volumes to larger datasets. Currently, he is working to enumerate and understand the diversity of inhibitory neurons in using densely segmented, synapse resolution reconstructions of mouse visual cortex.