Albert Cardona

Albert Cardona is a neuroscientist and connectomics researcher who is a Programme Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. and a Professor at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, UK. He is also a Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge. His research maps neuronal circuits with synaptic resolution using volume electron microscopy, particularly in small animals such as the Drosophila, and studies how the structure of a neural circuit relates to its function During this period, he developed computational and image-processing methods for neural circuit reconstruction and co-founded two influential open-source platforms that have become widely adopted in the neuroscience community.

Cardona joined the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Janelia Research Campus in 2012, serving as Group Leader until 2019. In 2019, he was appointed Programme Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology The platform extends ImageJ with features specifically designed for analyzing large biological datasets.

He also co-founded CATMAID (Collaborative Annotation Toolkit for Massive Amounts of Image Data), a web-based platform that enables distributed teams of researchers to collaboratively reconstruct neural circuits from electron microscopy data.

Insect brain connectome Cardona is a co-senior author of the first complete synaptic-resolution connectome of an insect brain, published in Science in 2023. This work mapped approximately 3,000 neurons and 548,000 synapses in the Drosophila larva brain, representing a significant milestone in connectomics. The reconstruction involved an international collaboration spanning multiple years and required the development of new computational methods for handling and analyzing the large-scale electron microscopy datasets.

Cardona's laboratory has used these connectome datasets to investigate the neural basis of learning, sensory processing, and motor control in Drosophila, combining anatomical reconstructions with functional studies to understand how circuit structure relates to behavior.