Professor of Neurology, Physiology & Neuroscience, Director, Center for Integrative Connectomics, USC Mark and Marry Stevens Neuroimaging & Informatics Institute, Keck School of Medicine, USC
Biography
Dr. Hong-Wei Dong M.D., Ph.D., graduated from medical school in China then received both doctoral and postdoctoral training as a neuroanatomist in Larry Swanson's laboratory at the University of Southern California (USC). He was a founding scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Sciences in 2004, where he made seminal contributions to the brain-wide gene expression mapping project-the Allen Brain Atlas project (ABA). Dr. Dong constructed the flagship Allen Reference Atlas (Dong, Wiley, 2008)-a standard mouse brain atlas that was used as the backbone of the ABA informatics and gene mapping project. Dr. Dong joined UCLA as Assistant Professor in 2006 and established The Mouse Connectome Project (MCP, www.MouseConnectome.org), a pioneering large-scale brain mapping project with the aim of creating a three-dimensional, Google Earth-like, digital Connectome atlas of the C57BL/6J mouse brain. To date, the MCP is an essential open resource for the broader neuroscientific community accessed by investigators worldwide. In 2013, Dr. Dong transitioned to USC and currently is Professor of Neurology, Physiology & Neuroscience as the founder and Director of the USC Center for Integrative Connectomics (CIC, http://cic.ini.usc.edu/) - comprised of neuroanatomists, computer scientists, and web programmers with cross-functional skillsets to facilitate the CIC's unique, interdisciplinary approach to computational neuroanatomy. He serves as an ad hoc reviewer for many neuroscience journals, including Cell, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Methods, Nature Communications, Neuron, Journal of Comparative Neurology, etc. He currently leads and participates in multiple NIH-funded projects within the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network (BICCN), focused on anatomical characterization of neuronal cell types of the complete mouse brain. Dr. Dong intends to construct the whole brain wiring diagram in order to understand structural and functional organizational principles of the mammalian brain.