Funded Projects

Although ultrasonic neurostimulation has the potential to outperform traditional treatments for many debilitating neurological disorders, it remains unclear how ultrasound affects nervous system activity on the molecular level.

In a process called tiling, homeostatic microglia homogenously organize in a grid-like fashion to achieve efficient surveillance of the brain. The molecular mechanisms underlying tiling are unknown. I hypothesize that microglia use cell-surface proteins to sense density of neighboring microglia, thereby contributing to constant cell-to-cell distances.

In order to reach the level of intelligence that humans possess, artificial agents need to be able to autonomously interact with other agents and humans and build rich models of how other minds work as a result of these interactions.

Intracortical brain-computer interfaces (iBCIs) can restore lost communication and motor function for people with severe speech and motor impairment due to neurological injury or disease. iBCIs measure neural activity from the brain, decode this activity into control signals, and use these signals to guide prosthetic devices such as computer cursors and prosthetic arms.

Cognitive neuroscience has traditionally focused on identifying the neural basis of psychological traits or state effects across large samples of participants. Recently, researchers have pushed towards providing more precise estimates of individual functional organization to better understand both psychological constructs as well as their supporting neural mechanisms.

Calcium imaging in freely behaving animals allows for the tracking of neuronal activity under approximately normal behavioral conditions. However, the slow response time of calcium imaging inhibits high resolution voltage and temporal measurements. To address this issue, modern molecular tools have been developed to optically report the high-speed dynamics of neurons more accurately.

The gut-brain axis is implicated in many essential physiological and psychological functions, ranging from feeding, emotion, motivation, to memory. As a critical component of the gut-brain axis, vagal sensory neurons exhibit distinct projection patterns to target specific visceral organs.

Membrane transport proteins are essential for life. They transport essential nutrients and minerals across the membrane barrier that surrounds each cell in the human body. This transport is necessary for every living process – from eating and breathing to learning and doing daily work.

Sleep is a critical behavioral state that fulfills essential needs for health, including clearing waste products (e.g., protein aggregates) from the brain. But sleep is not everlasting. As humans age, sleep quality strikingly deteriorates, and this decline is associated with dementias (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease).

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.

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.