Travis Hage
Travis Hage joined the Allen Institute in 2016 to help perform electrophysiology and photostimulation experiments to unravel cortical microcircuitry. Travis received his undergraduate training in Biology at the University of Texas in Austin. As part of a senior thesis with Dr. Nace Golding, Travis helped characterize the cellular physiology of an auditory brainstem circuit. Travis then went on to graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis. As a student in Lawrence Salkoff’s laboratory he used whole-cell electrophysiology and single channel recordings to uncover unique aspects of potassium channel and sodium channel function. Before joining the Allen Institute, Travis was a postdoc in Dr. Zayd Khaliq’s lab at the National Institutes of Health Intramural Research Program. There, he used a combination of electrophysiology, two photon imaging and photostimulation to study cellular physiology and synaptic integration in midbrain dopamine neurons.
research focus
My long-term research interests are centered around understanding the rules by which neurons transform their inputs into their outputs. There are many components to this subject, but chief among them is understanding the patterns of connectivity amongst different classes and types of neurons. I am interested in combining whole-cell electrophysiology with modern imaging and optogenetic techniques to perform experiments that would not be possible if utilizing these methods in isolation. Working at the Allen Institute also provides the unique opportunity to test new genetic tools and work across teams to obtain multi-modal datasets on the same pieces of tissue.
