Dr. Joshua T. Dudman is a Fellow at the Janelia Farm Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His lab focuses on the control of voluntary movement and learned behaviors by the mammalian basal ganglia. Over the past 2 years he has been establishing techniques for electrophysiological and optical recording from awake, behaving mice performing both simple voluntary actions and operant conditioning. Dr. Dudman's lab also applies two-photon imaging and photostimulation to study basal ganglia microcircuits in vitro. To provide a connection between these cellular mechanistic studies performed in vitro, and the patterns of activity recorded during behavioral manipulations, the lab applies a wide range of computational and analytic techniques.

Dr. Dudman was an undergraduate at Amherst College, receiving a B.A. in Neuroscience with distinction. While at Amherst College Dr. Dudman worked with Steven George making in vivo intracellular recordings from Purkinje cells of the grass frog. In addition, Dr. Dudman did research in the Movement Disorders Clinic at the University of Rochester and at Lab for the Study of Retinal Degeneration at the University of Sydney in Australia. After college, Dr. Dudman went to work with Dr. Christine Konradi at Harvard Medical School. There he studied the molecular signaling underlying dopamine-induced changes in gene transcription in medium spiny neurons of the rat striatum. In September 2001 Dr. Dudman began his graduate studies at Columbia University. As a National Science Foundation graduate fellow, Dr. Dudman studied the role of the hyperpolarization activated cationic channel (HCN) in the physiology of hippocampal neurons and spatial learning with Steven Siegelbaum in collaboration with Eric Kandel's lab. Subsequent studies during his thesis work reported the discovery of a novel form of synaptic plasticity in hippocampal pyramidal neurons. For his dissertation Dr. Dudman received distinction from Columbia University as well as the Dean's Award for Excellence in Research. Dr. Dudman was then a postdoctoral fellow with Drs. Siegelbaum and Kandel where he performed in vivo extracellular recordings from the hippocampus of freely moving, genetically-modified mice.

In 2008, Dr. Dudman was appointed a Fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In addition to his work at HHMI, Dr. Dudman has taught for the past three years as a lecturer in the Ion Channels course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories and has organized a Cellular Neuroscience course for the Champalimaud Foundation Neuroscience Programme in Lisbon, Portugal.