Christopher D Harvey

Christopher D. Harvey, Ph.D.

Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School
Director of Admissions, Program in Neuroscience

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Christopher Harvey, PhD

Professor of Neurobiology
Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School

Email: christopher_harvey@hms.harvard.edu
Website: Harvey Lab website – more information about Christopher Harvey’s research (opens in a new tab)

The Aim

The Harvey Lab studies how brain circuits guide navigation, memory, and decision‑making.

The Impact

Finding your way from point A to point B requires the brain to integrate memory, sensory information, and ongoing decisions in real time. The Harvey Lab uses virtual‑reality environments and advanced imaging tools to watch these computations unfold in living neural circuits, identifying the specific cell types and connection patterns that make them possible. Because working memory and navigation are impaired in Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, and traumatic brain injury, this research lays important groundwork for understanding what goes wrong in such conditions, and what interventions might be possible.

A Closer Look

Publications View
Stable task information from an unstable neural population.
Authors: Authors: Rule ME, Loback AR, Raman DV, Driscoll LN, Harvey CD, O'Leary T.
Elife
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Meissner corpuscles and their spatially intermingled afferents underlie gentle touch perception.
Authors: Authors: Neubarth NL, Emanuel AJ, Liu Y, Springel MW, Handler A, Zhang Q, Lehnert BP, Guo C, Orefice LL, Abdelaziz A, DeLisle MM, Iskols M, Rhyins J, Kim SJ, Cattel SJ, Regehr W, Harvey CD, Drugowitsch J, Ginty DD.
Science
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Causes and consequences of representational drift.
Authors: Authors: Rule ME, O'Leary T, Harvey CD.
Curr Opin Neurobiol
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A scalable platform for the development of cell-type-specific viral drivers.
Authors: Authors: Hrvatin S, Tzeng CP, Nagy MA, Stroud H, Koutsioumpa C, Wilcox OF, Assad EG, Green J, Harvey CD, Griffith EC, Greenberg ME.
Elife
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Voltage imaging and optogenetics reveal behaviour-dependent changes in hippocampal dynamics.
Authors: Authors: Adam Y, Kim JJ, Lou S, Zhao Y, Xie ME, Brinks D, Wu H, Mostajo-Radji MA, Kheifets S, Parot V, Chettih S, Williams KJ, Gmeiner B, Farhi SL, Madisen L, Buchanan EK, Kinsella I, Zhou D, Paninski L, Harvey CD, Zeng H, Arlotta P, Campbell RE, Cohen AE.
Nature
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The Spatial Structure of Neural Encoding in Mouse Posterior Cortex during Navigation.
Authors: Authors: Minderer M, Brown KD, Harvey CD.
Neuron
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Single-neuron perturbations reveal feature-specific competition in V1.
Authors: Authors: Chettih SN, Harvey CD.
Nature
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Information estimation using nonparametric copulas.
Authors: Authors: Safaai H, Onken A, Harvey CD, Panzeri S.
Phys Rev E
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Silk Fibroin Films Facilitate Single-Step Targeted Expression of Optogenetic Proteins.
Authors: Authors: Jackman SL, Chen CH, Chettih SN, Neufeld SQ, Drew IR, Agba CK, Flaquer I, Stefano AN, Kennedy TJ, Belinsky JE, Roberston K, Beron CC, Sabatini BL, Harvey CD, Regehr WG.
Cell Rep
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Dynamic Reorganization of Neuronal Activity Patterns in Parietal Cortex.
Authors: Authors: Driscoll LN, Pettit NL, Minderer M, Chettih SN, Harvey CD.
Cell
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