Funded Projects

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Neural circuits can exhibit remarkable stability (e.g., when supporting long-term memory) as well as flexibility (e.g., when supporting rapid learning).

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.

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.

Cephalopods, including the cuttlefish, octopus, and squid, possess one of the most advanced nervous systems among invertebrates. With their advanced nervous systems, cephalopods are able to perform sophisticated behaviors such as navigating in open water to search for food. Yet how their nervous systems accomplish spatial navigation remains completely unknown.

What are the principles that guide curiosity-based exploration? What is the neural circuitry that implements curiosity? How can insights related to the phenomenon of curiosity improve the education and capabilities of humans and artificially intelligent agents? To address these questions, Isaac Kauvar will take an interdisciplinary approach — positioned at the intersection of computer science, neuroscience, and psychology.

Vibrotactile stimulation provides powerful somatosensory and proprioceptive input to the nervous system.

Many of the largest, most complex genes in the genome are enriched in the brain and are frequently mutated or misregulated in neurological diseases and disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, autism spectrum disorders, and Rett syndrome.

Multicellular organisms consist of numerous cell types with specialized biological functions. To understand such complex biological systems, genetic access to each cell type is needed for functional analysis and manipulations.

Myelin is the protective covering that surrounds nerve fibers to accelerate communication between different parts of the nervous system. Damage to myelin occurs in diseases such as multiple sclerosis, which compromises nerve signaling and impairs motor and cognitive function.

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.