Ya-Hui Chou joined Dr. Cheng-Ting Chien’s lab in the Institute of Molecular Biology at Academia Sinica in 1999 as a graduate student. She studied how planar cell polarity genes pattern the Drosophila eye and received her Ph.D. in 2003, with Chien-Tien Hsu Outstanding Graduate Dissertation Award. After one-year postdoctoral study in Dr. Chien’s lab, she joined Dr. Liqun Luo’s lab in the Department of Biology at Stanford University in 2004. In Luo lab, she used the Drosophila olfactory system as a model to study mechanisms of neural circuit wiring. Her work offers insights into how the cell body positions of peripheral olfactory receptor neurons are coordinated with central targets and how they achieve precise axon targeting. In addition, she and colleagues demonstrated olfactory local interneurons (LNs) are highly diverse and variable in their morphologies and electrophysiological properties, which serves as the groundwork for future LN research and the variability of neuronal circuits. 

       In 2011, she joined Institute of Cellular and Organismic Biology at Academia Sinica as an assistant Research Fellow. She is currently an Associate Research fellow in the same institute. Ya-Hui Chou’s lab has been focusing on olfactory local interneuron network to explore the neural circuit dynamics in cellular, circuit, and behavior levels. The fact that interneurons are highly diverse and variable makes studying interneuron morphological and synaptic dynamics, functions, and consequent behavior outputs very challenging. To make these questions addressable, her lab has built a fundamental map of LN development and versatile LN drivers to label and manipulate distinct types of LNs. They further addressed the neural dynamic and animal behavior through building a camera-model Drosophila treadmill system and a mathematic model of interneuron network variability.

      Ya-Hui Chou’s research has earned her several awards, including Career Development Award from Academia Sinica. She has served as an editorial board member of Journal of Neurogenetics since 2019. 

Although sculpted by similar developmental programs, individuals in a given species exhibit great variation in their genetic composition and behavioral patterns. How genetic, environmental, and experience-dependent factors collectively shape our brain circuits (thus individuality) is one of the central questions of biology. My lab attempts to understand how neuronal diversity and variability arise, how they contribute to neuronal circuit activity, dynamics, and behavioral outputs, and how experience shapes the variability of the neuronal circuit. Specifically, we try to explore the underlying mechanisms involved in neuronal variability in the fruit fly olfactory system, with a particular focus on the development, organization, variation and function of the local interneuron network. 

Three large-scale unbiased genetic screens to search for molecules involved in the LN development and wiring were conducted.  Currently, we focus on neural circuit dynamics through three approaches: (1) establishing a full developmental map of distinct types of local interneurons and uncovering the underlying mechanisms orchestrating interneuron diversity; (2) exploring the dynamics of single LNs and associated local interneuron connectomes; (3) building behavior paradigms and mathematic models for studying the dynamics of local neural connectomes.