Rate My Professor Helen Hou

Helen Hou is an Assistant Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where she joined the neuroscience faculty and established the Hou Lab in July 2022. She received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Harvard University in 2017 as a graduate student in Bernardo Sabatini's laboratory and earned a B.Sc. in Physics and Biology from MIT. Previously, Hou was a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University, working with Nate Sawtell and Larry Abbott. She also served as a Visiting Research Scientist in neuromotor interfaces at the CTRL-Labs team at Reality Labs and held a Grass Fellowship at the Marine Biological Laboratory.

Hou's research centers on the neural mechanisms underlying dynamic motor and physiological control in natural and innate behaviors, with a focus on facial expression using rodents as a model system. Her lab applies electrophysiological, imaging, neuroanatomical, behavioral, and computational approaches to investigate the brainstem as an evolutionarily conserved integration node between the forebrain and spinal cord. Notable publications include "Central Control Circuit for Context-Dependent Micturition" (Cell, 2016), "Central Network Dynamics Regulating Visceral and Humoral Functions" (Journal of Neuroscience, 2017), "A 3D whole-face movement analysis system to uncover underlying physiology in mice" (bioRxiv, 2024), and "A generic noninvasive neuromotor interface for human-computer interaction" (bioRxiv, 2024). Earlier work featured "Promiscuous binding of extracellular peptides to cell surface class I MHC protein" (PNAS, 2012). Hou has been awarded the NARSAD Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (2022) and the Helen Hay Whitney Fellowship (2018). She has taught courses including Neuroscience of Motor Control in the CSHL Graduate Program and contributed to computational neuroscience workshops.