SCSB Lunch Series with Dr. Chaoyi Zhang: Reading the social brain: volumetric functional ultrasound imaging in behaving marmosets

About

Date: Friday, November 6, 2026 Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm Location: Simons Center Conference room 46-6011. Zoom: (link below)

Speaker: Chaoyi Zhang, Ph.D. Affiliation: Postdoctoral Fellow, Guoping Feng Laboratory, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Yang Tan Collective, MIT

Talk title: Reading the social brain: volumetric functional ultrasound imaging in behaving marmosets

Abstract: Primate social brain engages distributed networks spanning prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, striatum, thalamus, and amygdala — circuits repeatedly implicated in autism and other neuropsychiatric disorders yet rarely observed at brain-wide scale in awake primate during genuine social interaction. The common marmoset is well suited to closing this gap: it is highly social, genetically tractable, and available as a transgenic model of autism risk genes. What has been missing is a way to record brain-wide activity while a marmoset behaves.

I will present a functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) platform we developed for awake marmosets, in which a section of skull is replaced with an acoustically transparent implant, giving volumetric access to cortical and subcortical structures at ~150 µm resolution. Combined with a marmoset whole-brain vascular reference map and an automated registration pipeline, this lets us compare activity in roughly 50 atlas-defined regions across sessions and animals.

Using this platform, we find that a live social partner evokes substantially stronger and more spatially extensive activation than video of that same partner, establishing live interaction as a more powerful driver of social brain activity in this preparation. Finally, I will discuss extending this approach to transgenic marmoset models of autism, to ask which brain-wide network signatures are altered and whether they can serve as circuit-level biomarkers.

Bio: Chaoyi Zhang is a postdoctoral in the laboratory of Guoping Feng at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT. He received his PhD in Neurobiology from Zhejiang University in 2022 and joined MIT in 2023. His research develops functional ultrasound imaging for brain-wide functional network mapping in behaving marmosets, with a translational focus on autism spectrum disorder. He established the chronic acoustic transparent cranial window for volumetric functional ultrasound in a non-human primate, together with the registration and analysis pipeline required for group-level comparison across animals. His current work applies this platform to social behavior and to transgenic marmoset models of autism risk genes, with the goal of identifying circuit-level network signatures that translate between animal models and human patients.