Dayu Lin

Dayu Lin is a neuroscientist and Professor of Psychiatry, Neuroscience and Physiology at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine in New York City. Lin discovered the neural circuits in the hypothalamus that give rise to aggression in mice. Her lab at NYU now probes the neural circuits underlying innate social behaviors, with a focus on aggressive and defensive behaviors.

Early life and education Lin was born in Shanghai, China. She pursued her undergraduate degree in biology at Fudan University in 1997 and studied Alzheimer's Disease for her undergraduate research project. Since olfaction is critical in perceiving the social environment, Lin explored how the olfactory bulb represents complex mixtures of social olfactory stimuli. Using electrophysiological recordings and by fractionation of the volatile compound in mouse urine, she found that populations of mitral cells are activated to single volatile compounds. This finding showed that the sum of responses to individual olfactory stimuli present within a complex olfactory stimulus gives rise to the neural representation of a complex smell. Lin worked under the mentorship of David Anderson exploring the neural circuits underlying innate social behaviors, specifically aggression, in mouse models. She found that optogenetically stimulating the ventrolateral subdivision of the ventromedial hypothalamus causes male mice to attack both male and female mice as well as inanimate objects. Lin's lab explores the neural circuit mechanisms driving innate social behaviors in mice, with a specific focus on aggression and defensive behavior. Lin's seminal work discovering the role of the ventrolateral part of the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMHvl) in driving aggressive behavior lays the foundation for most of her lab's research program. They found a population of neurons that were specifically activated in response to male investigation, male attack as well as distance from the male aggressor and animal velocity during attack. They found that the VMHvl is essential for aggression-seeking behavior, such that optogenetic inhibition of this area decreased aggression-seeking while activation increased aggression-seeking and intensified future attack. Since the neural signals in these downstream VMHvl projectors were time locked to jaw muscle movement, Lin and her team proposed that the lPAG neural activity represents a simplifies VMHvl code that drives aggression-related actions. She found that the estrogen receptor α expressing cells were excited during defence. 2013 McKnight Scholar Award 2012 Janett Rosenberg Trubatch Career Development Award 2011 Klingenstein Neuroscience Fellow 2006 Capranica Prize in Neuroethology

Select publications Hierarchical Representations Of Aggression In A Hypothalamic-Midbrain Circuit. Falkner, Annegret L; Wei, Dongyu; Song, Anjeli; Watsek, Li W; Chen, Irene; Chen, Patricia; Feng, James E; Lin, Dayu. Neuron. 2020 Mar 06; Hypothalamic Control Of Conspecific Self-Defense. Wang, Li; Talwar, Vaishali; Osakada, Takuya; Kuang, Amy; Guo, Zhichao; Yamaguchi, Takashi; Lin, Dayu. Cell Reports. 2019 Feb 12; 26(7):1747-1758.e5 Hashikawa K, Hashikawa Y, Tremblay R, Zhang J, Feng JE, Sabol A, Piper WT, Lee H, Rudy B, Lin D. Esr1(+) cells in the ventromedial hypothalamus control female aggression. 2018. Nature Neuroscience. PMID 28920934 DOI: 10.1038/nn.4644 Falkner AL, Grosenick L, Davidson TJ, Deisseroth K, Lin D. Hypothalamic control of male aggression-seeking behavior. 2016. Nature Neuroscience. PMID 26950005 DOI: 10.1038/nn.4264 Falkner AL, Dollar P, Perona P, Anderson DJ, Lin D. Decoding ventromedial hypothalamic neural activity during male mouse aggression. 2014. The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society For Neuroscience. 34: 5971–84. PMID 24760856 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5109-13.2014 Lin D, Boyle MP, Dollar P, Lee H, Lein ES, Perona P, Anderson DJ. Functional identification of an aggression locus in the mouse hypothalamus. 2011. Nature. 470: 221–6. PMID 21307935 DOI: 10.1038/nature09736 Lin da Y, Shea SD, Katz LC. Representation of natural stimuli in the rodent main olfactory bulb. 2006. Neuron. 50: 937–49. PMID 16772174 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2006.03.021 Lin DY, Zhang SZ, Block E, Katz LC. Encoding social signals in the mouse main olfactory bulb. 2005. Nature. 434: 470–7. PMID 15724148 DOI: 10.1038/nature03414