Funded Projects

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.

For decades we have known that a wide variety of animals use the earth’s magnetic field for navigation, although the means by which they sense it has remained a mystery. There is a long-standing idea that animals like migratory birds use small magnetic deposits in their beaks to act as a compass, however, this idea remains unverified and is currently questioned by many in the field.

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.

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.

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.

Due to the critical role that dopamine producing neurons play in pathophysiology, it is important to examine the function of its co-released GABA. This research aims to study GABA biosynthesis in midbrain dopamine producing neurons and it’s effect on striatal inhibition.

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.

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.

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.

A top priority for people with paralysis is reach and grasp ability. Technologies such as robotic arm prostheses or electrically stimulating paralyzed muscles can meet this need. Existing methods rely on the remaining muscles, are unintuitive and require laborious sequences of simple commands. Reading out a patient’s desired movement directly from their brain could overcome these limitations.

Our ability to remember makes us human, and is essential for acquiring new skills and integrating previous experiences into future decision-making. While it is known that long-term memory (LTM) formation requires new gene expression, we lack a detailed and comprehensive understanding of which genes must be expressed to encode memories, and how these genes change over time during the consolidation of memories.

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a debilitating condition that affects young adults between the ages of 16 and 30, which leads to lifelong medical and financial burdens. SCI still results in a decreased quality-of-life and lower life expectancy for patients. This is due in part to the lack of a regenerative-based therapeutic approach to treating SCI in the clinic.

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are proteins that exist within the cell membrane and act to transfer the information encoded within neurotransmitters and drugs into cell responses. GPCRs exist throughout the body in several systems including the nervous system.

Understanding how glia regulate the expression and/or post-translational modification of sodium ion channels may lead to the identification of new pharmaceutical targets for the treatment of pain.

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.

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.