Funded Awards

Project summary: This project will develop and validate a comprehensive toolset of novel technologies for imaging axonal projections across scales, and will deploy this toolset to map a complex system of cortico- subcortical projections in the macaque and human brain.

Abstract The hippocampus has a well-established role in the initial formation and storage of memory. However, little is understood about brain mechanisms that support the re-organization and transfer of memories into longer-term cortical storage.

Abstract This project aims to develop the first Inverse Activity Marker (IAM) for detecting neuronal inhibition (broadly defined as the decrease of neuronal activities).

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Individuals make choices and prioritize actions using complex processes that assign value to rewards and associated stimuli based on prior experience.

PROJECT SUMMARY Sensory representations are influenced by an animal’s external context, internal state, past experiences, expectations, and future goals.

A central goal of neuroscience is to discover how neural circuits control the body’s muscles to produce behavior.

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT After a stroke, walking ability can be compromised, which can lead to reduced quality of life and decreased ability to perform activities of daily living.

Many animals rely on their ability to navigate to the source of airborne odor plumes for survival. Studies dating back a century have shown that insects combine mechanosensory and olfactory cues to navigate, surging upwind when detecting odor but go crosswind or downwind when losing the signal.

PROJECT SUMMARY The insular cortex (IC) is a multimodal hub that integrates interoceptive and exteroceptive information to control diverse aspects of animal behaviors related to cognition, emotion, and motivation.

PROJECT SUMMARY Animals can exhibit goal-directed behaviors in novel environments, despite limited experience with them. How does the brain make and use inferences about the underlying statistics and generative structure of environments to guide behavior?

ABSTRACT ‒ UG3/UH3 Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), applied to areas like the subthalamic nucleus (STN), is a standard treatment for Parkinson Disease (PD), however, DBS has inherent surgical risks as well as potential for infections and adverse side effects.

PROJECT SUMMARY The world around us has a statistical structure that we can use to improve our choices. Learning the underlying structure by identifying key features, such as the rate of change, is useful for adapting and optimizing our decision-making strategies.

The ability to measure and manipulate local brain circuit activity in living, behaving animals is essential to understanding the complexities of brain function and dysfunction.

Project Summary/Abstract In sensory decision-making, choices are influenced by non-sensory factors such as motivation, attention, and recent trial history.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: Vision and touch share a critical function—perception of 3D object shape.

Cortical assembly formation through excitatory/inhibitory circuit plasticity. Project Summary Throughout the brain, sensory information is thought to be represented by the joint activity of neurons that form functionally connected assemblies.

Project Summary To navigate and guide locomotion in a complex 3D environment, humans and animals must make countless judgments of their direction of self-motion, or heading.

Robust navigation, which is critical for an animal’s survival, requires the processing of complex sensory information spanning different modalities and time scales.

PROJECT SUMMARY Serotonin is an evolutionarily conserved neurotransmitter that modulates the activity of excitatory and inhibitory neurons throughout the entire mammalian brain and is thus essential for diverse aspects of physiology and behavior.

Abstract In recent years, the number of neurons that we can record simultaneously has seen an exponential increase, presenting a daunting challenge: how do we analyze these complex and high-dimensional datasets to gain insight into how neural circuits perform computation?