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Anthony Zador

Anthony Zador

Professor
The Alle Davis and Maxine Harrison Professor of Neurosciences

M.D., Ph.D., Yale University, 1994

zador@cshl.edu | 516-367-6950

Zador Lab Website   Faculty Profile

My lab studies how circuitry in the brain gives rise to complex behaviors, one of nature’s great mysteries. We study how the auditory cortex processes sound, and how this is interrupted in autism. We also seek to obtain a wiring diagram of the mouse brain at the resolution of individual neurons. Our unusual approach exploits cheap and rapid “next-gen” gene sequencing technology.

Anthony Zador and colleagues study how brain circuitry gives rise to complex behavior. Work in the lab is focused on two main areas. First, they ask how the cortex processes sound, how that processing is modulated by attention, and how it is disrupted in neuropsychiatric disorders such as autism. Recently, the lab found that when a rat makes a decision about a sound, the information needed to make the decision is passed to a particular subset of neurons in the auditory cortex whose axons project to a structure called the striatum. In the second major line of work in the Zador lab, they are developing new methods for determining the complete wiring instructions of the mouse brain at single-neuron resolution, which they term the “Connectome.” In contrast to previous methods, which make use of microscopy, these methods exploit high-throughput DNA sequencing. Because the costs of DNA sequencing are plummeting so rapidly, these methods have the potential to yield the complete wiring diagram of an entire brain for just thousands of dollars.

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    Worldwide collaboration, brain-wide technology

    September 18, 2025

    CSHL neuroscientists, current and former, contributed to two major brain-mapping studies recently published in Nature and featured on CNN.


    image of the At the Lab podcast logo with black and white portrait of Alexei Koulakov and Tony Zador on a blue background

    At the Lab: AI evolves

    May 20, 2025

    CSHL neuroscientists discuss the biological brain’s multibillion-year advantage over AI—and the new algorithm they built based on that concept.


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    A perception quiz to blow your mind

    March 26, 2025

    Ready to think differently about how you see, smell, hear, taste, touch, and make sense of the world around you?


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    The next evolution of AI begins with ours

    November 25, 2024

    How do innate abilities get passed down? Cold Spring Harbor neuroscientists have devised a solution that could lead to faster artificial intelligence.


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    Great minds think AI

    October 16, 2024

    Innovators and thought leaders in the fields of artificial intelligence and neuroscience came together for a meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.


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    NeuroAI with an eye on equity

    September 30, 2024

    Working at the intersection of neuroscience and computer science, CSHL researchers aim to build AI that will benefit everyone, not just the lucky few.


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    Mapping the mind with BARseq

    June 3, 2024

    CSHL Professor Anthony Zador’s powerful brain-mapping tool has received a major upgrade. Instead of thousands of neurons, it can now map millions.


    image of Katalin Karikó, Bruce Stillman, and Z. Josh Huang at the 2023 CSHL Recombinant DNA meeting

    President’s essay: The continuous cycle of discovery

    May 30, 2024

    CSHL President & CEO Bruce Stillman discusses our institution’s societal impacts and global connections as forces for further scientific progress.


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    The CSHL School of Biological Sciences’ class of 2024

    May 5, 2024

    The School of Biological Sciences awarded Ph.D. degrees to 11 students this year. Here are some stories and reflections from their time at CSHL.


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    Zador wins maiden NIH BRAIN CONNECTS grant

    October 24, 2023

    Zador and collaborators have been awarded over $2 million to fine-tune a new brain mapping technique—one that might help transform the field.


See all Zador news

All Publications

Discovery and shaping of decision strategies using adversarial stimuli in rats

11 Sep 2025 | bioRxiv
Zhang, Anqi;  Zador, Anthony;  

Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making

Sep 2025 | Nature | 645(8079):192-200
Findling, Charles;  Hubert, Felix;  International Brain Laboratory;  Acerbi, Luigi;  Benson, Brandon;  Benson, Julius;  Birman, Daniel;  Bonacchi, Niccolò;  Buchanan, E;  Bruijns, Sebastian;  Carandini, Matteo;  Catarino, Joana;  Chapuis, Gaelle;  Churchland, Anne;  Dan, Yang;  Davatolhagh, Felicia;  DeWitt, Eric;  Engel, Tatiana;  Fabbri, Michele;  Faulkner, Mayo;  Fiete, Ila;  Freitas-Silva, Laura;  Gerçek, Berk;  Harris, Kenneth;  Häusser, Michael;  Hofer, Sonja;  Hu, Fei;  Huntenburg, Julia;  Khanal, Anup;  Krasniak, Chris;  Langdon, Christopher;  Langfield, Christopher;  Latham, Peter;  Lau, Petrina;  Mainen, Zach;  Meijer, Guido;  Miska, Nathaniel;  Mrsic-Flogel, Thomas;  Noel, Jean-Paul;  Nylund, Kai;  Pan-Vazquez, Alejandro;  Paninski, Liam;  Pillow, Jonathan;  Rossant, Cyrille;  Roth, Noam;  Schaeffer, Rylan;  Schartner, Michael;  Shi, Yanliang;  Socha, Karolina;  Steinmetz, Nicholas;  Svoboda, Karel;  Tessereau, Charline;  Urai, Anne;  Wells, Miles;  West, Steven;  Whiteway, Matthew;  Winter, Olivier;  Witten, Ilana;  Zador, Anthony;  Zhang, Yizi;  Dayan, Peter;  Pouget, Alexandre;  

TissueFormer: a neural network for labeling tissue from grouped single-cell RNA profiles

19 Aug 2025 | bioRxiv
Benjamin, Ari;  Zador, Anthony;  

Massive multiplexing of spatially resolved single neuron projections with axonal BARseq

27 Sep 2024 | Nature Communications | 15(1):8371
Yuan, Li;  Chen, Xiaoyin;  Zhan, Huiqing;  Henry, Gilbert;  Zador, Anthony;  

Encoding innate ability through a genomic bottleneck

17 Sep 2024 | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | 121(38):e2409160121
Shuvaev, Sergey;  Lachi, Divyansha;  Koulakov, Alexei;  Zador, Anthony;  

Selective expansion of motor cortical projections in the evolution of vocal novelty

14 Sep 2024 | bioRxiv
Banerjee, Arkarup;  Isko, Emily;  Harpole, Clifford;  Zheng, Xiaoyue;  Zhan, Huiqing;  Davis, Martin;  Zador, Anthony;  

Lightning Pose: improved animal pose estimation via semi-supervised learning, Bayesian ensembling and cloud-native open-source tools

Jul 2024 | Nature Methods | 21(7):1316-1328
Biderman, Dan;  Whiteway, Matthew;  Hurwitz, Cole;  Greenspan, Nicholas;  Lee, Robert;  Vishnubhotla, Ankit;  Warren, Richard;  Pedraja, Federico;  Noone, Dillon;  Schartner, Michael;  Huntenburg, Julia;  Khanal, Anup;  Meijer, Guido;  Noel, Jean-Paul;  Pan-Vazquez, Alejandro;  Socha, Karolina;  Urai, Anne;  International Brain Laboratory;  Cunningham, John;  Sawtell, Nathaniel;  Paninski, Liam;  

Whole-cortex in situ sequencing reveals input-dependent area identity

24 Apr 2024 | Nature
Chen, Xiaoyin;  Fischer, Stephan;  Rue, Mara;  Zhang, Aixin;  Mukherjee, Didhiti;  Kanold, Patrick;  Gillis, Jesse;  Zador, Anthony;  

The origins of COSYNE: Building a community

27 Feb 2024 | The Transmitter
Zador, Anthony;  

Neurons in the primary visual cortex of freely moving rats encode both sensory and non-sensory task variables

Dec 2023 | PLoS Biology | 21(12):e3002384
Zhang, Anqi;  Zador, Anthony;  Klausberger, Thomas;  

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