Neurosciences Seed Grants

The results of this highly interdisciplinary project will test the innovative hypothesis that molecular-scale mechanical signals sculpt synapse formation and will shed light on how latrophilin signaling regulates synaptogenesis in the context of both neurodevelopment and neuropsychiatric disease.

We aim to understand how brain mechanisms of spatial reasoning are brought into play during symbolic mathematical cognition and to identify individual differences in these mechanisms that co-vary with mathematical ability and mathematical experience.

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 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.