Description:

The Department of Neuroscience Welcomes Dr. Ugne Klibaite. 

Postdoctoral Fellow (MBB Fellowship)
PhD in Quantitative and Computational Biology, Princeton University, 2018
BS in Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University, 2013

Social behavior is fundamental to our lives and those of animals, and social interactions are one of the most salient features of an animal’s experience of the world. However, we often lack the tools to describe these interactions with quantitative rigor or we capture only a small sliver of an animal’s social repertoire. This gap in our quantitative abilities limits our understanding of the principles underlying social behavior, as well as of the neuropsychiatric disorders, like autism, that perturb it. In this talk, I will describe our advances in capturing and quantifying social behavior. First, I will present a technique to precisely track the postures of freely interacting animals in 3D and a complementary multi-scale embedding approach I developed to identify a rich landscape of stereotyped social interactions in rodents. Applying this approach revealed shifts in social motifs across strains, disease models, and pharmacological manipulations. Performing this type of deep phenotyping on seven new monogenic rat models of autism, we found that they exhibited a spectrum of behavioral changes compared to their wild type littermates. Several of these models demonstrated consistent inter-animal social deficits and are promising candidates for modeling autism-related social phenotypes in rats. Together, this framework presents a new way to use a first-principles biophysics approach to decompose and classify the elements of complex social interactions, enabling sophisticated interrogations of social dynamics and their neurobiological underpinnings.