The neural connectome has been a subject of increasing research interest since the creation of the BRAIN initiative. Many research and engineering development devoted towards probing functional and structural connections between different regions of the brain are increasingly constantly being made. Optical technologies are no exception to this, facilitating study of the connectome down to the single-cell level. These technologies also realize the investigation of numerous types of electrical and metabolic phenomena, such as calcium signaling, phase changes associated with membrane movement, birefringence changes in cells associated with action potentials, and signaling of NADH and FAD, among other molecules. All of these can be tracked optically, which promotes investigations of how these cells communicate with one another through each of these mechanisms, but more interestingly, how these work together collectively. Optical coherence tomography (OCT), fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM), and multiphoton microscopy (MPM) allow for the simultaneous measurement of all these dynamics. With such rich sources of metabolic information, sophisticated analysis techniques must also be developed to investigate how the collective nature of these dynamics ultimately promotes survival and transfer of information in neural signals. In the Biophotonics Imaging Laboratory, we continue to make advances on each of these fronts with the goal of developing robust combinations of tools to help researchers investigate the complex mechanisms of brain function in healthy and diseased states.