Davi Bock

Associate Professor

dbock@uvm.edu
portrait of Davi Bock
dbock@uvm.edu
Alma mater(s)
  • Ph.D. Neurobiology, Harvard University, 2011
  • A.B. Biology, Brown University, 1997
Affiliated Department(s)

Larner College of Medicine
Department of Neurological Sciences


 

BIO

I am interested in the structural bases for information processing in biological systems. For the last two decades, I have focused on synaptic connectomics: mapping the connectivity of neuronal circuits at the level of individual neurons and the chemical synapses between them.

In order to understand how neuronal circuits process, transform, and store information, the detailed synaptic wiring diagram or ‘connectome’ is a necessary (but not sufficient!) element. My graduate work focused on the question of how to generate electron microscopy (EM) datasets of sufficient size and quality to map whole neuronal circuits within mammalian neocortex. I spearheaded a team that prototyped a new transmission EM camera array (TEMCA) for high throughput EM imaging, and used it to acquire an unprecedently large EM image volume in mouse visual cortex. This was also the first demonstration of combined in vivo 2-photon calcium imaging and volume EM in mammalian brain. It laid the foundation for a number of additional studies by my lab and others using the EM dataset (which we made publicly available) as well as the TEMCA system. This work also directly inspired a large IARPA- and NIH-funded program called MICrONS (Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks), which achieved a key goal of combining calcium imaging and electron microscopy of a 1 mm cube of mouse visual cortex.

After graduate school, I started a lab at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). There we built a new generation of high-speed EM camera arrays and used them to image the complete brain of an adult fruit fly at synaptic resolution. This was a large, multidisciplinary collaboration, the last few years of which were funded as a Janelia Project Team, which I co-managed. During this time, I also helped to coordinate the growth of a community of 20+ labs inside and outside Janelia working collaboratively to map circuits within the fly brain. We opted to open the Full Adult Fly Brain (FAFB) dataset for use by any lab in their own research, a decision that resulted in segmentations by Google and the FlyWire team at Princeton, and the continued broad exploitation of the FAFB dataset by the Drosophila neurobiology community. 

While at Janelia, my lab also continued to mine the mouse cortical dataset acquired in my graduate work, resulting in the novel observation that the majority of myelin in upper layers of mouse cortex ensheathes the axons of local inhibitory neurons, rather than long-range excitatory axons as was thought to be typical.

In 2019 I returned to my home state of Vermont and joined the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont as research faculty. Here my laboratory has focused on developing software tools and infrastructure for the analysis of connectomics data, most particularly for the FAFB whole fruit fly brain EM volume. In collaboration with colleagues at the MRC LMB in Cambridge, UK and at Princeton, as well as private consultants, we made substantial contributions to the FlyWire connectome mapping effort, which culminated in the publication of the full connectome of the adult fruit fly brain and many accompanying analyses in Fall of 2024 in a special issue of Nature.

Currently my lab continues to pursue synaptic connectomics analyses as well as new directions, such as the ultrastructural basis of information processing in single-celled eukaryotes, in particular the ciliated protists.

Publications

Davi Bock on Google Scholar

Awards and Achievements

  • 1993 Brown University. Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (UTRA); for summer research in marsh ecology.
  • 1997 Santa Fe Institute. Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Fellowship; for summer research in cellular automata and evolutionary computation.
  • 2004-2005 Harvard NeuroDiscovery Center (formerly Harvard Center for Neurodegeneration and Repair) Fellow.
  • 2007 Harvard Department of Neurobiology. First place, departmental poster competition.
  • 2011 Cajal Club. Krieg Cortical Scholar.
  • 2017 Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole Whitman Center Early Career Investigator Award.
  • 2025 Visiting Sabbatical Fellow, EMBL Heidelberg

Bio

I am interested in the structural bases for information processing in biological systems. For the last two decades, I have focused on synaptic connectomics: mapping the connectivity of neuronal circuits at the level of individual neurons and the chemical synapses between them.

In order to understand how neuronal circuits process, transform, and store information, the detailed synaptic wiring diagram or ‘connectome’ is a necessary (but not sufficient!) element. My graduate work focused on the question of how to generate electron microscopy (EM) datasets of sufficient size and quality to map whole neuronal circuits within mammalian neocortex. I spearheaded a team that prototyped a new transmission EM camera array (TEMCA) for high throughput EM imaging, and used it to acquire an unprecedently large EM image volume in mouse visual cortex. This was also the first demonstration of combined in vivo 2-photon calcium imaging and volume EM in mammalian brain. It laid the foundation for a number of additional studies by my lab and others using the EM dataset (which we made publicly available) as well as the TEMCA system. This work also directly inspired a large IARPA- and NIH-funded program called MICrONS (Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks), which achieved a key goal of combining calcium imaging and electron microscopy of a 1 mm cube of mouse visual cortex.

After graduate school, I started a lab at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). There we built a new generation of high-speed EM camera arrays and used them to image the complete brain of an adult fruit fly at synaptic resolution. This was a large, multidisciplinary collaboration, the last few years of which were funded as a Janelia Project Team, which I co-managed. During this time, I also helped to coordinate the growth of a community of 20+ labs inside and outside Janelia working collaboratively to map circuits within the fly brain. We opted to open the Full Adult Fly Brain (FAFB) dataset for use by any lab in their own research, a decision that resulted in segmentations by Google and the FlyWire team at Princeton, and the continued broad exploitation of the FAFB dataset by the Drosophila neurobiology community. 

While at Janelia, my lab also continued to mine the mouse cortical dataset acquired in my graduate work, resulting in the novel observation that the majority of myelin in upper layers of mouse cortex ensheathes the axons of local inhibitory neurons, rather than long-range excitatory axons as was thought to be typical.

In 2019 I returned to my home state of Vermont and joined the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont as research faculty. Here my laboratory has focused on developing software tools and infrastructure for the analysis of connectomics data, most particularly for the FAFB whole fruit fly brain EM volume. In collaboration with colleagues at the MRC LMB in Cambridge, UK and at Princeton, as well as private consultants, we made substantial contributions to the FlyWire connectome mapping effort, which culminated in the publication of the full connectome of the adult fruit fly brain and many accompanying analyses in Fall of 2024 in a special issue of Nature.

Currently my lab continues to pursue synaptic connectomics analyses as well as new directions, such as the ultrastructural basis of information processing in single-celled eukaryotes, in particular the ciliated protists.

Publications

Davi Bock on Google Scholar

Awards and Achievements

  • 1993 Brown University. Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (UTRA); for summer research in marsh ecology.
  • 1997 Santa Fe Institute. Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Fellowship; for summer research in cellular automata and evolutionary computation.
  • 2004-2005 Harvard NeuroDiscovery Center (formerly Harvard Center for Neurodegeneration and Repair) Fellow.
  • 2007 Harvard Department of Neurobiology. First place, departmental poster competition.
  • 2011 Cajal Club. Krieg Cortical Scholar.
  • 2017 Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole Whitman Center Early Career Investigator Award.
  • 2025 Visiting Sabbatical Fellow, EMBL Heidelberg

In The Media

Davi Bock sitting in front of a computer screen

UVM News: Thoughts Fly

Inside that speck, some 140,000 neurons are linked together—hundreds of feet of microscopic, living spaghetti—to form more than 50 million connections called synapses.
An image of a brain of a fruit fly

New York Times: "Connections in Stunning Detail"

A fruit fly’s brain is smaller than a poppy seed, but it packs tremendous complexity into that tiny space. Over 140,000 neurons are joined together by more than 490 feet of wiring, as long as four blue whales placed end to end. Hundreds of scientists mapped out those connections in stunning detail.
A researcher examines a computer screen

Washington Post: A "Major Neuroscience Milestone"

An international team has mapped all of the neurons and connections in the brain of the fruit fly, a major advancement toward understanding the human brain.