Christian Peters, Ph.D. University of Illinois at Chicago
Opioid use disorder has become a major health crisis in the US as a result of over-prescription of addictive opiate-derived analgesics. Opioids form a strong physical interaction with mu-opioid receptors in the brain. These receptors are highly expressed in the reward circuitry of the brain, and ...
Akhila Rajan, Ph.D., Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Increased life expectancy has resulted in a higher incidence of age-related dementia, but treatments remain elusive. Obesity has been established as an independent risk factor for developing dementia. Yet, the mechanisms by which increased mid-life adiposity contributes to neuronal dysregulation,...
Johannes Schöneberg, Ph.D. University of California, San Diego
Neurogenesis is the process in which the neuronal cells of the brain are created from stem cells. In embryos, problems with neurogenesis lead to severe embryonal defects and mental disabilities in children such as learning and memory disabilities, seizures and even death. In adults, impaired neur...
Max A. Tischfield, Ph.D., Rutgers University
Dr. Tischfield’s laboratory is a member of the Tourette International Genetics Consortium, a global effort spanning multiple continents to decipher the genetic basis of Tourette Syndrome and associated conditions. Their consortium has identified several genes that are affected in Tourette S...
Nilay Yapici, Ph.D., Cornell University
Food intake is influenced by many factors such as physiological, social, emotional, and contextual settings. The neural circuits that regulate hunger, satiety, and food intake have been extensively studied in vertebrate models. These studies have identified many regions that impact food intake an...
Lindsay M. De Biase, Ph.D., University of California Los Angeles
Synapses, the sites of signaling between neurons in the brain, play essential roles in learning, memory, and the health of neurons themselves. An enduring mystery is why some neurons are more vulnerable to synapse dysfunction, synapse loss, and neurodegenerative disease during aging.
Stephen W. Flavell, Ph.D., MIT
As animals navigate their environments, they construct internal models of the external sensory world and use these models to guide their behavior. This ability to incorporate ongoing sensory stimuli into active neural representations of the external world is a fundamental building block of intell...
Xiaojing Gao, Ph.D., Stanford University
Cells are the building blocks of our bodies. We get sick when the cells “misbehave”. The way modern gene therapies work is to introduce genes, fragments of DNA molecules that can direct the creation of specific proteins, into cells, and to fix what’s wrong about the cells or to ...
Rafiq Huda, Ph.D., Rutgers University
Movement requires coordinated activity across a large brain-wide network. The striatum is a particularly important part of this circuit; it integrates motor-related information from many distinct brain regions to regulate the activity of downstream motor structures.
Ethan G. Hughes, Ph.D., University of Colorado
Can the adult brain regenerate? Finding the answer to this question is an overarching goal of the field of neuroscience.
