About me

I’m Kai Cao, and I work as a Lab Technician in the Senzai Lab at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. I earned my B.S. in Biological Sciences from the University of California, Irvine in 2025, graduating cum laude.

I’m working on how the brain builds and maintains a sense of direction. I study head-direction cells during freely moving behavior, sleep, and fear-related learning, and I’m especially interested in how visual information interacts with the brain’s internal representation of orientation.

For these projects, I build experimental systems that allow us to track behavior, control the visual environment, and record neural activity at the same time. I also develop analysis pipelines to connect neural activity with behavior, and I’m involved throughout the experimental process, from surgical preparation and neural recording to histology, anatomical reconstruction, and custom hardware design.

Before joining Northwestern, I worked in the Igarashi Lab at UC Irvine School of Medicine, where I studied how dopamine dysfunction may contribute to associative-memory impairment in Alzheimer’s disease. I worked on behavioral experiments, neural-activity recordings, brain-tissue processing, and whole-brain reconstruction of individual dopaminergic neurons. This work contributed to a 2026 publication in Nature Neuroscience and was supported by two grants from UC Irvine’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.

I’m broadly interested in spatial navigation, learning and memory, and neurodegenerative disease. I like working at the intersection of experimental neuroscience, engineering, and computational analysis, especially when building new tools can help answer questions that were previously difficult to study.

Publication

Nakagawa, T., Xie, J. L., Park, K., Cao, K., Savadkohighodjanaki, M., Zhang, Y. J., Jun, H., Ichii, A., Lee, J. Y., Soma, S., Medhat, Y. K., Saido, T. C., & Igarashi, K. M. (2026). Early dopamine disruption in the entorhinal cortex of a knock-in model of Alzheimer’s disease. Nature Neuroscience. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02260-w

Presentation

Kai Cao, Tatsuki Nakagawa*, Jiayun L. Xie*, Marjan Savadkohi, Jason Y. Lee, Heechul Jun & Kei M. Igarashi: Circuit mechanisms underlying associative memory impairment in APP-KI, UC Irvine Undergraduate Research Symposia, 2024. (Poster)

Annabelle Dressler*, Kai Cao*, Saasha Gajjaer*, Leone Manaloto*, Yutian Zhang, Tatsuki Nakagawa, Kiwon Park & Kei M. Igarashi: Tracing the Axonal Projection of a Single LEC-projecting SNc Dopaminergic Neuron, UC Irvine Undergraduate Research Symposia, 2025. (Poster)

Kai Cao, Ayomiposi Adewakun, Yuta Senzai: A Free-moving Virtual Reality System to Probe Interactions between Head Direction Cells and Visual Inputs, NUIN, 2025. (Poster)