Neurosciences Seed Grants

A faculty team bridging chemistry and pain research will use optogenetics to understand an important signaling pathway involved in chronic pain.

This team will leverage the power of silicon probes to record from hundreds of neurons in mouse epilepsy models to understand neural correlates of the pre-seizure EEG. These results will be used to optimize a real-time seizure prediction algorithm that will be tested in human patients.

We will engineer next generation bundled microwires deep brain stimulation using microwires that are thinner than human hair. We will use a small LED display to deliver patterned stimulation by ‘playing a video’ on the display chip, where each pixel is connected to a microwire.

We aim to develop a noninvasive method to produce on-demand and dynamically programmable light emission patterns throughout the entire brain of live mice. The emission patterns can be controlled by brain-penetrant focused ultrasound and switched with millisecond precision for rapid brain-wide optogenetic screening of different brain regions.

A computational biophysicist and a protein engineer will team up to improve voltage-sensing fluorescent proteins, proteins that can report electrical activity by changing their production of light. The goal is to visualize the electrical activity in neurons in real time.