Education
Bio
James is a postdoctoral fellow in the Oldenburg Lab at the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine. He received his B.S. in Biology from East Tennessee State University before completing his Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the University of Louisville in 2025 under the mentorship of Dr. Martha Bickford. There, he investigated how inputs from multiple sources converge onto single neurons in the visual thalamus, combining electron microscopy, viral tract tracing, and dual-opsin in vitro patch clamp electrophysiology to study circuit integration at cellular resolution.
In the Oldenburg Lab, James continues his trajectory from single-neuron to population-level understanding of how the brain encodes information. He investigates how population codes in motor cortex shape activity in downstream subcortical motor structures, combining high-density silicon probe electrophysiology with two-photon calcium imaging and single-cell holographic optogenetics to probe how signals underlying motor planning and initiation are transmitted through the brain.