Funded Projects

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.

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.

To understand how sensory information and physiological state integrate to drive decisions and behaviors. Dr. Xiaoke Chen's lab is focusing now on interoception, which is the sense of the physiological condition of the body. This include our abilities to feel hungry or satiated, to sense heightened blood pressure and heart rate during stress, and to discriminate different types of pain.

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.

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

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.

Everyone is well aware of their white adipose tissue and its ability to store excess energy as fat. In fact the efficiency with which it does this has led to obesity and related metabolic diseases becoming the largest single health burden in the United States.

Developing technology to interface with the brain and create intelligent prosthetics.

Autism is a highly genetic developmental brain disorder which is characterized by social impairments. Autism affects 1 in 68 US children, with an annual cost in the US of $250 billion dollars. Unfortunately, the basic biology of autism remains poorly understood.

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.

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.

This research seeks to understand how our genes encode the instructions for neurons in the neocortex to properly arise during normal brain development. This knowledge will allow scientists to understand how genetic mutations perturb development leading to human disease.

Understanding the relationship between structure and function in the human brain is a key interest in neuroscience. In recent years the focus is turning to understanding the role of the white matter in human cognition, brain function and neurological disorders.

Stroke is the main cause of adult disability; 80% of survivors sustain motor (movement) deficits that interfere with activities of daily living. There exists no proven therapeutic strategy for motor recovery of the upper extremity following stroke.

Combining a detailed understanding of brain circuits with technology that modulates neural activity to develop improved ways of treating mental health conditions.

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.

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.

Creating a center for neurodegeneration research focusing on brain maintenance and regeneration, and the role of the immune system in these processes.

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