My postdoctoral work with Dr. Albert Lee is focused on studying the intracellular and network level phenomena underlying declarative memory formation in the mammalian hippocampus. The experiments involve in vivo intracellular and multi-site extracellular electrophysiological recordings of hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neurons in awake, behaving rats. Interestingly, not only is the rodent hippocampus engaged during spatial memory tasks in real environments, but also in virtual reality environments. Motivated by this finding, we have been developing a head-fixed spatial navigation system for rats and mice, wherein the subjects explore virtual environments during recording. Importantly, we hope to gain new insights into the sub-threshold membrane potential dynamics of CA1 neurons underlying spatial navigation and novel memory formation.