Funded Projects

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.

Adaptation to environmental variations is vital for animal survival. While short-lived organisms face unpredictable environmental fluctuations, long-lived animals are subject to regular and generally drastic environmental changes across different seasons.

Schwann cells (SCs) sort and myelinate peripheral axons, and impairments in either process can cause long-term disability. There are no therapeutic strategies for targeting SC dysfunction, underscoring the need to investigate mechanisms of sorting and myelination. Both processes require highly motile SC cytoplasmic protrusions, but the basis of this motility is unclear.

Meta-learning, an old concept in psychology, is the ability of humans to improve the way they learn with experience.  Our previous experience of learning a skill makes us better at learning another, related skill. For instance, an athlete will learn a new sport faster than someone without the same level of experience in similar learning tasks.

Absence epilepsy is a form of pediatric epilepsy which causes seizures with brief lapses in awareness. Electron microscopy results in a murine model of absence epilepsy support the hypothesis that maladaptive myelination plays a role in disease progression.

This team is developing wearable stimulation devices to improve limb function after stroke. The technology includes a tactile stimulation method, and the wireless, lightweight, and low-cost wearable computing devices to apply this stimulation.

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.

Behavioral state—such as alertness or exhaustion—dramatically impacts how our brains function. Yet, in spite of the key role that it plays in cognition, how behavioral state influences brain function remains a central mystery in neuroscience.

Developing a platform of biocompatible nanoparticles that uncage a drug payload upon ultrasound application.

Dr. Iram will use brain intrinsic and systemic regulators of aging, in an attempt to accelerate maturation of human-derived brain organoids. This has the potential to produce the first ever aged human brain 3D cultures and identify factors which accelerate brain aging.

Developing a protein-engineered nerve implant that mimics the biochemical and mechanical cues of native tissue in order to enhance the potential for neural regeneration following injury.

Dr. Miguel Garcia believes that identifying the mechanism of myelin wrapping is important in understanding neural development and is a critical first step towards creating much needed therapeutic approaches to stimulate remyelination in patients with demyelinating diseases.

These tools will enable us to dissect how myelin contributes to specific brain circuits and types of neurons, bringing us closer to a holistic understanding of how cells in the brain collaborate to build a functional nervous system.

We believe our research has the potential of generating transformative results for both neuroscience research and neurological applications, also offering strategies to manipulate key intracellular pathways to prevent gliosis in therapeutic neural implants.

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.

By performing a molecular and neural network analysis across behaviorally divergent pair bonding species, Dr. Jessica Nowicki will use the power of comparative analysis to reveal core mechanisms that regulate pair bonding.

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.

Developing an automated seizure detection and localization system based on deep neural networks, EEG data, and real-time video with the goal to dramatically increase neurologist diagnostic capabilities while improving quality of care.