Funded Research Projects
NeuroDiscovery | Postdoctoral Fellowship
Lead Researcher(s): Christopher Miranda
Calcium imaging in freely behaving animals allows for the tracking of neuronal activity under approximately normal behavioral conditions. However, the slow response time of calcium imaging inhibits high resolution voltage and temporal measurements. To address this issue, modern molecular tools have...
NeuroDiscovery | Postdoctoral Fellowship
Lead Researcher(s): Zihao Ou
The gut-brain axis is implicated in many essential physiological and psychological functions, ranging from feeding, emotion, motivation, to memory. As a critical component of the gut-brain axis, vagal sensory neurons exhibit distinct projection patterns to target specific visceral organs....
NeuroDiscovery | Postdoctoral Fellowship
Lead Researcher(s): Darrel Deo
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...
NeuroDiscovery | Postdoctoral Fellowship
Lead Researcher(s): Mengyuan Xu
Membrane transport proteins are essential for life. They transport essential nutrients and minerals across the membrane barrier that surrounds each cell in the human body. This transport is necessary for every living process – from eating and breathing to learning and doing daily work. Those...
NeuroDiscovery | Postdoctoral Fellowship
Lead Researcher(s): Logan Cross
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. This learning process should mirror aspects of the human...
NeuroDiscovery | Seed Grant
Lead Researcher(s): Alexander Dunn, Thomas Sudhof
The results of this highly interdisciplinary project will test the innovative hypothesis that molecular-scale mechanical signals sculpt synapse formation and will shed light on how latrophilin signaling regulates synaptogenesis in the context of both neurodevelopment and neuropsychiatric disease.
NeuroHealth | Seed Grant
Lead Researcher(s): Carla Shatz, Anca M. Pasca, MD
Maternal infection is linked to increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. This proposal examines how virus-associated cytokines, specifically interferons, affect human neurons modeled in brain organoids or studied directly in fetal brain samples.
NeuroEngineering | Seed Grant
We propose a new magnetic sensor that is sensitive to picoTesla-scale fields, a localized magnetic stimulator with small form-factor, and a seamless integration of both systems for applications in experimental and clinical neuroscience.
NeuroHealth | Seed Grant
Lead Researcher(s): Xinnan Wang, Michael Bassik
We will comprehensively define the gene network associated with mitochondrial dysfunction in Parkinson's disease using a cutting-edge technology, CRISPR, to understand how these nerve cells die in PD and how we can reverse the cell death to treat the disease.
NeuroEngineering | Seed Grant
Lead Researcher(s): Guosong Hong, Xiaoke Chen
We aim to develop a noninvasive method to produce on-demand and dynamically programmable light emission patterns throughout the entire brain of live mice. The emission patterns can be controlled by brain-penetrant focused ultrasound and switched with millisecond precision for rapid brain-wide...
