Funded Projects

We understand a lot about how the brain gets rewired when learning a new skill by repetitive practice, such as hitting a curveball. However, how learning and experience alter the innate behaviors that we are born with is poorly understood.

The purpose of this collaborative project is to study neuronal mechanisms associated with social stress. In particular we will test whether the energy producing systems, known as mitochondria, in a specific set of brain cells are important to confer resilience to stressful stimuli. This research may lead to treatments of stress and anxiety disorders. 

Combining a detailed understanding of brain circuits with technology that modulates neural activity to develop improved ways of treating mental health conditions.

The goal is to forge an inter-disciplinary collaboration between physicists, biologists, chemists, and translational medical scientists by inventing new ways of visualizing the brain, from individual molecules to neuronal circuits to entire brain regions, from a normally functioning neuron to a diseased brain.

One in three people will develop Alzheimer’s disease or another dementia during their lifetime, but effective treatment still does not exist despite intense efforts. Recently, blood from young mice has been found to rejuvenate several tissues of old mice, including the brain.

Precise neural circuit assembly is critical for appropriate function of the nervous system. A functional circuit requires proper targeting and matching of axons and dendrites of pre- and post-synaptic neurons. However, our understanding of the mechanisms that establish wiring specificity of complex neural circuit is far from complete.

Cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) is an important intracellular messenger that plays a critical role in the development of the central and peripheral nervous system. However, the mechanisms of action of cAMP in the nervous system development are poorly understood and there are currently no suitable methods to visualize cAMP in the cells of living animals.

Ion channels in the membranes of neuronal cells are the key regulators of neuronal signaling. An ion channel works as a gate that can open and close to allow specific molecules to enter or leave the cell. One important type of ion channels are voltage-gated sodium channels (NaVs), which are essential for many processes in our brain.

For decades we have known that a wide variety of animals use the earth’s magnetic field for navigation, although the means by which they sense it has remained a mystery. There is a long-standing idea that animals like migratory birds use small magnetic deposits in their beaks to act as a compass, however, this idea remains unverified and is currently questioned by many in the field.

This research seeks to understand how our genes encode the instructions for neurons in the neocortex to properly arise during normal brain development. This knowledge will allow scientists to understand how genetic mutations perturb development leading to human disease.

Due to the critical role that dopamine producing neurons play in pathophysiology, it is important to examine the function of its co-released GABA. This research aims to study GABA biosynthesis in midbrain dopamine producing neurons and it’s effect on striatal inhibition.

Everyone is well aware of their white adipose tissue and its ability to store excess energy as fat. In fact the efficiency with which it does this has led to obesity and related metabolic diseases becoming the largest single health burden in the United States.

Our ability to detect and interpret sounds relies on specialized sensory cells within the snail-shaped hearing organ of the inner ear—the cochlea. These hair cells sense physical movement and then convert that mechanical stimulus into a biological signal that we perceive as sound. These mechano-sensory cells perform this task within microseconds and can do so for sub-nanomechanical stimuli.

My proposed visit to the Van De Ville lab is centered on the idea to expand our methods beyond brain tumors to other neurological diseases using the Van De Ville lab’s expertise in neuro-imaging. Imaging genomics has been focused mainly on oncology; however, other neurological diseases can be studied in the same way.

Brain data analyses involves many steps and every step is prone to errors and uncertainties. Ignoring uncertainties can potentially leading to overconfident conclusions. To improve reproducibility it is important to propagate errors throughout the anlaysis.

Humans naturally learn to generate and process complicated sequential patterns. For example, a concert pianist can learn an enormous repertoire of memorized music. In neuroscience, it is widely thought that synaptic plasticity – the process by which the connections between neurons change response to experience – underlies such remarkable behavior.

Our ability to remember makes us human, and is essential for acquiring new skills and integrating previous experiences into future decision-making. While it is known that long-term memory (LTM) formation requires new gene expression, we lack a detailed and comprehensive understanding of which genes must be expressed to encode memories, and how these genes change over time during the consolidation of memories.

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are proteins that exist within the cell membrane and act to transfer the information encoded within neurotransmitters and drugs into cell responses. GPCRs exist throughout the body in several systems including the nervous system.

Understanding how glia regulate the expression and/or post-translational modification of sodium ion channels may lead to the identification of new pharmaceutical targets for the treatment of pain.

The NeuroPlant Initiative aims to leverage a botanical armamentarium to manipulate the brain — by building a pipeline to explore chemicals synthesized in plants as potential new treatments for neurological disease and as a window into the chemistry of the brain.

Investigating how the brain develops from infancy to adulthood across species, focusing on how the interplay between structural development, functional development, experience and affect brain computations and ultimately behavior.

Dr. Daniel Bear propose to augment state-of-the-art neural networks with two biologically-inspired properties: the ability to represent the physical world as it changes over time and the ability to learn from self-created signals rather than explicit human instruction.