Kei Igarashi

Kei Igarashi is the Chancellor's Fellow & Associate Professor in the Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on understanding brain mechanisms underlying memory formation and their disruption in Alzheimer's disease, particularly investigating the entorhinal cortex and hippocampal circuits. Key areas include dopaminergic signaling's role in memory encoding, neuronal remapping deficits in disease models, and circuit dynamics in olfactory and spatial learning.

Research Interests: Alzheimer's Disease, Entorhinal Cortex Function, Hippocampal Circuits, Dopaminergic Pathways, Neuronal Remapping, and Neurodegenerative Mechanisms.

Recent work highlights early entorhinal dopamine dysfunction in Alzheimer's models and the co-dependent role of prefrontal and entorhinal neurons in learning item-outcome rules. His lab uses advanced electrophysiological techniques, including multi-electrode recordings and optogenetics, to study these processes.