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K-State Today

Division of Communications and Marketing
Kansas State University
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September 9, 2019

Thomas Mueller to present Anatomy and Physiology Seminar

Submitted by Gail Eyestone

Thomas Mueller, assistant professor of research in the Division of Biology, is the featured speaker for the Sept. 10 Anatomy and Physiology Seminar. He will present "Amygdala Circuits of Emotion and Cognition in Zebrafish – A Neural Systems Approach" at 4 p.m. in 407 Trotter Hall.

Mueller specializes on the functional organization, evolution, and development of the zebrafish brain. In his graduate studies from 1999 to 2003, he showed how gene expression patterns in larval zebrafish relate to developmental processes and explain otherwise hidden evolutionary relationships to mammals. Later, he published these findings in the "Atlas of the Early Developing Zebrafish Brain" with Mario Wullimann, Elsevier, 2005, 2nd edition 2016, which became the standard anatomical resource in the field.

Between 2003 and 2010, Mueller studied how developmental processes shape the functional organization of the mature brain in zebrafish. In his postdoctoral studies, both at the Centre de la Recherche Scientifique in Gif-sur-Yvette, France and at the University of California, San Francisco where he and his co-workers discovered novel developmental constraints of the zebrafish forebrain. From 2010 to 2013, he focused on the chemoarchitectonic organization of the mature zebrafish emotional brain at the University of Freiburg in Germany.

At K-State, Mueller applies multiple imaging approaches to further dissect amygdala circuits controlling emotion and cognition. His works uniquely integrate behavioral and developmental studies with imaging projects of mature and histologically differentiated brain structures to ultimately understand brain function.