Funded Projects

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.

The causes of neurodegenerative disorders like multiple sclerosis or Alzheimer’s disease are incompletely understood, hindering our ability to gain precise diagnoses and design effective therapeutics. Understanding how the circadian rhythms regulate myelin-forming precursors will impart unique insights into normal and aberrant myelination and will have a positive impact on developing therapeutic strategies to restructure myelin.

This team will use their Neuroscience:Translate award to develop a large-scale bi-directional neural interface that will restore high-fidelity vision to people blinded by retinal degeneration.

This team will use their Neuroscience:Translate award to employ a novel therapeutic technique to correct pathogenic mutations causing Parkinson’s disease.

This team aims to revolutionize future stroke treatment both in clinics and at home by combining a brain-computer interface and augmented reality (AR) into a single rehabilitation platform.

This team aims to advance augmentative and alternative communication technology for people with communication disorders and enable new forms of human-computer interaction by combining novel materials science with modern machine learning.

This team will use their Neuroscience:Translate award to develop an entirely new class of ischemic stroke treatment device that will lead to improved clot extraction to improve the success of endovascular thrombectomy.

This team will use their Neuroscience:Translate award to develop the first wearable ultrasound (US) device for the treatment of inflammatory diseases, such as Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) and Inflammatory Bowel Disease.

We propose a new line of research whose goal is to examine the druggability of a protein-protein interface involving ApoE, an apolipoprotein whose gene variants represent the strongest genetic risk factor for AD.

People with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) have different types of bacteria in their guts compared to people without neurological diseases. We will study which gut bacteria for people with PD to gain a better understanding of how gut bacteria contribute to inflammation in the body and in the brain or people with this condition. 

We propose to apply mass spectrometry techniques to measure BHB-Phe and other KD metabolites in children undergoing KD for refractory epilepsy at Stanford. Further, in a mouse model of refractory genetic epilepsy, we will compare targeted BHB-Phe treatment to full KD treatment using transcriptomics, EEG assessment of seizures and cognitive testing.

Why do all our brains mature and age in different ways, leading to different cognitive and behavioral outcomes? We envision a novel method that “copies” the information from the RNAs made by the neurons to sensor RNAs we artificially introduce into live animals. 

In this study, we aim to (i) perform a feasibility study to determine the acceptance and feasibility of performing such recordings in the AN and ARFID eating disorders population and (ii) test the hypothesis that the electrophysiologic monitoring of the brain and stomach is associated with a clinically validated behavioral measure of interoception involving water distention of the stomach.

This project is focused on developing EEG-based measures of cognitive control and conflict processing in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD is characterized by recurrent, intrusive, and distressing thoughts, and patients are often limited by rigid, inflexible behavioral routines as well as poor clinical insight into their illness.

Commonly used measures of interoception—the brain’s perception of the body’s internal state—only subjectively capture the body’s interpretation of hunger and satiety signaling. The Coleman Lab is developing objective, noninvasive, electrophysiologic approaches to assess human hunger and satiety signaling and how external senses modulate this signaling.

This team is working on understanding which patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) will best benefit from cognitive training. They are researching a multimodal approach to understand this question and will use their Koret pilot grant award to evaluate high-density EEG biomarkers for successful cognitive training in MCI. 

This project aims to identify brain-based EEG markers of self-efficacy and self-regulation, which are the two critical treatment targets for people with chronic pain and comorbid heavy alcohol use. Such objective markers will assist in accurate diagnosis and assessment of treatment responses, which may enable a precision medicine approach for chronic pain and substance use disorders. 

This team is developing a cutting-edge mixed reality application to improve the targeted delivery of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). TMS is increasingly being used as a treatment for psychiatric conditions, but the success of the treatment depends critically on its precise delivery.

This team is developing new transcranial magnetic stimulation methods that optimize neuromodulation effects using music-induced brain state dynamics.

The Stanford Brain Rejuvenation Project is an initiative by leading aging researchers, neuroscientists, chemists, and engineers to understand the basis of brain aging and rejuvenation and how they relate to neurodegeneration.

Breaches barriers in our understanding of stroke to develop therapies and improve stroke recovery.