Funded Projects

Millions of people are blind, yet we still don’t have the technology to satisfactorily restore vision. I aim to create a prosthetic device to do so. This device can be implanted in the eyes of a blind patient, resting on a tissue layer called the retina.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are systems that enable using neural activity to control and interact with external devices. For people who lose the ability to move or speak due to injury or disease, BCIs provide a potential avenue to restore this loss of function.

It is more common nowadays for people to have their own wearable devices to measure physiological signals like heart rate and respiration to keep track of physical diseases. However, monitoring decline in cognitive functions or development of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s (PD), is still complex and tricky.

While acute pain is an important biological signal in response to injured tissue, chronic pain occurs when the pain signaling outlasts the initial injury and has deleterious effects on health and quality of life. Chronic pain represents an enormous public health burden with few therapeutic options.

    More than 60 million people in the United States currently suffer from a serious mental illness, and the associated financial, productivity and human suffering costs are only projected to rise in the near future.

The ability to ignore distracters is impaired for individuals with psychosis. This impairment negatively impacts treatment effectiveness and the ability of individuals with psychosis to function fully.

Understanding the brain requires understanding how the neurons that constitute it perform computations, and how those computations relate to human behavior.

Synaptic junctions linking individual neurons constitute the fundamental building blocks of our brain. Understanding their inner working is crucial to unravel the mechanisms by which our brain processes information. However, imaging structures at a relevant sub-synaptic level is challenging and has often hampered advances in neuroscience.

Spinal cord injury (SCI) causes permanent damage to about 12,000 new patients in the US each year, primarily young adults. A common result of SCI is paralysis, and unfortunately, less than 1% of SCI patients have full neurological recovery by the time of hospital discharge.

Continuous blood flow to the brain is needed for neural tissues to survive. Noninvasive imaging of cerebral blood flow (CBF) in humans is challenging, but is critically useful to understand normal brain physiology and to help patients with cerebrovascular disorders such as stroke.

The aim of this project is to improve the accuracy and reliability of dMRI fiber tracking through comparison with a gold standard that unambiguously relates the measured water diffusion patterns to the underlying tissue structure.

A top priority for people with paralysis is reach and grasp ability. Technologies such as robotic arm prostheses or electrically stimulating paralyzed muscles can meet this need. Existing methods rely on the remaining muscles, are unintuitive and require laborious sequences of simple commands. Reading out a patient’s desired movement directly from their brain could overcome these limitations.

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a debilitating condition that affects young adults between the ages of 16 and 30, which leads to lifelong medical and financial burdens. SCI still results in a decreased quality-of-life and lower life expectancy for patients. This is due in part to the lack of a regenerative-based therapeutic approach to treating SCI in the clinic.

Dr. Dante Muratore's goal is to design the next generation of neural interfaces that allow single-cell resolution when communicating with the nervous system. To achieve this, he has conceived a new way of reading information from the neural system.

Communication between cells in the nervous system regulates the senses, memory, and information processing. Using electrical and biochemical sensors, such as patch clamps, voltage-sensitive dyes, and calcium-sensitive dyes, scientists have mapped with extraordinary detail the interactions of the nervous system.

Neural circuits can exhibit remarkable stability (e.g., when supporting long-term memory) as well as flexibility (e.g., when supporting rapid learning).

Aging is the number one risk factor for debilitating diseases such as neurodegeneration. Can manipulation of neurons in the brain alter the body’s physiological state to extend lifespan? Neuropeptides are key modulators of short-term homeostasis such as feeding, temperature, and sleep.

What are the principles that guide curiosity-based exploration? What is the neural circuitry that implements curiosity? How can insights related to the phenomenon of curiosity improve the education and capabilities of humans and artificially intelligent agents? To address these questions, Isaac Kauvar will take an interdisciplinary approach — positioned at the intersection of computer science, neuroscience, and psychology.

Vibrotactile stimulation provides powerful somatosensory and proprioceptive input to the nervous system.

Multicellular organisms consist of numerous cell types with specialized biological functions. To understand such complex biological systems, genetic access to each cell type is needed for functional analysis and manipulations.

Myelin is the protective covering that surrounds nerve fibers to accelerate communication between different parts of the nervous system. Damage to myelin occurs in diseases such as multiple sclerosis, which compromises nerve signaling and impairs motor and cognitive function.