Funded Research Projects
NeuroHealth | SIGF - Graduate Fellowship
Lead Researcher(s): Erin Kunz
Many neurological injuries and diseases such as brainstem stroke and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) result in severe speech impairment, drastically reducing quality of life. Recent progress in brain-computer interfaces (BCI) has allowed these individuals to communicate, but performance is...
NeuroDiscovery | SIGF - Graduate Fellowship
Lead Researcher(s): Tamara Chan
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,...
NeuroEngineering | SIGF - Graduate Fellowship
Lead Researcher(s): Yixiu Zhao
We propose a novel framework for efficient Bayesian cognition called Inference via Abstraction (IvA), which learns to approximate complex world models with simpler abstractions that capture main dependencies, but leverage structure in the prior distribution for efficient inference. We instantiate...
NeuroDiscovery | SIGF - Graduate Fellowship
Lead Researcher(s): Kyrstyn Ong
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. Since ultrasound acts on a molecular scale in a macroscopic environment...
NeuroEngineering | Neuroscience:Translate
Lead Researcher(s): Chirag Patel, MD, PhD, Melanie Hayden Gephart
The limited available treatments (e.g., radiation, chemotherapy) for glioblastoma (GBM) can lead to swelling in the brain that causes elevated intracranial pressure (ICP), the timing of which is unpredictable; this results in the patient presenting to the emergency room with headaches, vomiting, or...
NeuroEngineering | Neuroscience:Translate
Lead Researcher(s): Peter L. Santa Maria, MD, PhD, Ada Poon
Sensorineural hearing loss is an increasingly prevalent condition that causes disability to over a third of US adults aged over 65. We are developing a breakthrough device to restore high-frequency hearing that preserves residual hearing through a reversible and minimally invasive approach.
NeuroHealth | Neuroscience:Translate
There are currently no available drugs for neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease. Using the power of a new vertebrate aging model, the African killifish, this team is investigating age-dependent protein aggregation at a systems level and identifying aggregating proteins in the...
NeuroDiscovery | Neuroscience:Translate
Lead Researcher(s): Jason Yeatman, Heidi M. Feldman
This proposal seeks to translate new technology developed in the Brain Development & Education Lab into an automated reading ability assessment tool that would be widely distributed to schools, clinics and research labs through a sustainable non-profit model.
NeuroHealth | Neuroscience:Translate
Lead Researcher(s): Helen Bronte-Stewart, MD, MS, Allison Okamura
This team is developing a device that will enable accurate diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease via telemedicine. They initially introduced the technology of Quantitative DigitoGraphy (QDG) using a repetitive alternating finger tapping (RAFT) task on a musical instrument digital interface (MIDI)...
NeuroEngineering | Neuroscience:Translate
Recurrent dizziness attacks are a debilitating condition for 10% of the population during their lifetime, and can lead to a complete inability to function, and to multiple hospital admissions and investigations chasing many potential diagnoses. This project aims to address the unmet need for means...
