Dr. Amit Vinograd

Dr. Amit Vinograd is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the Gray Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, Tel Aviv University. His laboratory studies how the brain generates, maintains, and regulates emotional and motivational states, with a focus on aggression, fear, social behavior, and mating.

Dr. Vinograd combines deep-brain two-photon calcium imaging, freely moving imaging, holographic single-cell optogenetics, behavioral analysis, and computational modeling to understand how neural population dynamics give rise to internal states. During his postdoctoral work in the laboratory of Prof. David J. Anderson at Caltech/HHMI, he provided causal evidence that a hypothalamic line attractor encodes an affective state related to aggression, published in Nature in 2024.

His current research aims to uncover general principles by which hypothalamic and limbic circuits transform sensory, social, hormonal, and neuromodulatory signals into persistent emotional states and adaptive behavior.

Dr. Amit Vinograd is a systems neuroscientist studying the neural circuit mechanisms of emotional internal states. He conducted postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology in the laboratory of Prof. David J. Anderson, where he developed approaches combining deep-brain two-photon imaging, holographic optogenetics, and dynamical systems modeling to study hypothalamic circuits controlling aggression.

His work demonstrated that VMHvl neurons can implement line-attractor dynamics during aggression-related states, and that targeted perturbation of attractor-contributing neurons can causally move the neural population along or away from the attractor manifold. This work provided direct experimental evidence for continuous attractor dynamics encoding an affective internal state in the mammalian hypothalamus.

In 2025, Dr. Vinograd joined Tel Aviv University as a faculty member, where he established a laboratory focused on the neural computation of affective and social states.

The Vinograd laboratory seeks to understand how emotional states are generated by neural circuits. We ask how populations of neurons in the hypothalamus and related limbic structures create internal states such as aggression, fear, mating drive, and social motivation.

A central idea in the lab is that emotional states are not simply reflexive responses to stimuli, but dynamical processes that can be initiated, maintained, intensified, suppressed, and read out by downstream circuits. We study these processes using cellular-resolution imaging, optogenetic perturbations, freely moving behavior, and computational models of neural population dynamics.

Major research directions include:

1. Neural dynamics of emotional states
   How do hypothalamic circuits generate persistent internal states such as aggressiveness or threat?
2. Circuit mechanisms of attractor dynamics
   How do recurrent connectivity, neuromodulators, neuropeptides, and hormones shape the stability and persistence of emotional states?
3. General principles across behaviors
   Are aggression, fear, and mating implemented by shared dynamical principles, or by distinct circuit mechanisms?
4. From internal state to behavior
   How are neural state variables decoded by downstream circuits to control action selection, escalation, persistence, and individual behavioral variability?
5. Computational psychiatry and affective dysregulation
   Can dynamical systems approaches help explain how emotional states become maladaptive in psychiatric disorders?