Browse wide-ranging research at the frontiers of neuroscience supported by Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute grants, awards, and training fellowships.
Projects
A principled investigation into the heterogeneous coding properties of medial entorhinal cortex that support accurate spatial navigation
Navigation through an environment to a remembered location is a critical skill we use every day. How does our brain accomplish such a task? Over the last few decades, several lines of evidence have suggested that a brain region called medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) supports navigation by encoding information our location and movement within an environment.
Understanding why neurons die in disease
Many neurological diseases feature the death of neurons, but the mechanisms that mediate cell death in these disorders are unknown. Astrogliosis, the response of a cell-type called “astrocytes” to injury, is common to most diseases of the central nervous system (CNS), and recent studies in our lab suggest that some reactive astrocytes may release a protein that is potently toxic to neurons.
NeuroChoice Initiative (Phase 2)
Neuro-circuit interventional research consortium for understanding the brain and improving treatment
Combining a detailed understanding of brain circuits with technology that modulates neural activity to develop improved ways of treating mental health conditions.
NeuroVision Initiative
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.
NeuroChoice: Optimizing Choice - from neuroscience to public policy
Determining higher-order organization of control and epileptic brain networks at single cell resolution
Dr. Darian Hadjiabadi aims to identify higher-order features of neuronal circuits responsible for seizure initiation and propagation by quantifying mesoscale-network reorganization in genetic models of zebra sh that faithfully recapitulate seizure dynamics in humans.
NeuroPlant Initiative
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.
Neurodevelopment Initiative
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.
A spatiotemporally-resolved circuit model of the physiologic and behavioral effects of subanesthetic ketamine activity in the limbic system
Developing a platform of biocompatible nanoparticles that uncage a drug payload upon ultrasound application.
A multi-rank statistical model to determine the impact of behavioral state on navigational coding by medial entorhinal cortex
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.
Nanoscale to circuit-level computational and experimental studies of the biophysical mechanism of ultrasound-mediated mechanical neurostimulation
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.
Elucidating mechanisms of microglial tiling
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.