Stanford Neurosciences Institute awards first round of Seed Grants

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BY AMY ADAMS

The Stanford Neurosciences Institute awarded their first round of Seed Grants, funding five projects, each of which brings together two or more faculty members to solve problems within the field of neuroscience.

The five successful grants will support collaborations to probe vision cell degeneration, math learning, autism, Alzheimer’s disease and improvements in deep brain stimulation used to treat Parkinson’s and other diseases.

Seed grants provide a small amount of funding that allows faculty to launch new collaborations and pilot novel ideas. They bridge faculty from across disciplines and schools to focus on critical challenges in neuroscience.

For this round of funding, the Institute encouraged neuroscience faculty to interface with three strategic areas of strength at Stanford: 1) engineering and the quantitative sciences, 2) chemical and molecular biology, and 3) the social sciences, humanities and professional schools of education, law and business. 

Funded grants

In vivo selection for gene mutations that counteract photoreceptor degeneration

Douglas Vollrath, Genetics 
Michael Bassik, Genetics 
Monte Winslow, Genetics and Pathology

Massively parallel microwire arrays for deep brain stimulation

Jun Ding, Neurosurgery 
Nicholas Melosh, Materials Science and Engineering

Brain mechanisms of spatial reasoning in mathematics learning

James McClelland, Psychology 
Bruce McCandliss, Graduate School of Education 
Anthony Norcia, Psychology

Creating an advanced transgenic animal model of autism

Karen Parker, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences 
Alexander Urban, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences 
Megan Albertelli, Comparative Medicine 
Joachim Hallmayer, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

A novel PET radioligand to identify microglial inflammation in Alzheimer’s disease

Katrin Andreasson, Neurology and Neurological Sciences 
Michelle James, Radiology 
Sanjay Malhotra, Radiation Oncology