PROJECT SUMMARY
Stroke is the leading cause of motor disability in the United States. While brain stimulation to enhance motor
function after stroke has shown promise in small studies, two recent large stroke trials did not find evidence for
significant benefits.
Funded Awards
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) BRAIN Initiative funds a wide-variety of research: toolmakers, trainees, individual labs testing new hypotheses, and large, team-based efforts aiming to catalyze neuroscience inquiry forward. Explore NIH BRAIN Initiative funded awards listed below. Click on the project title to learn more about it within NIH RePORTER.
To see more NIH-funded awards and associated publications, please visit the NIH RePORTER.
Title
Investigator(s)
Institution
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunity #
Project #
Title
Optimizing oscillatory epidural electrical stimulation to selectively increase task-related population dynamics in motor areas
Investigator
Karunesh Ganguly, Jeffrey A Roberts
Institute
university of california, san francisco
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunities Number
Project Number
Title
Photoactivatable systems for controlling transcription and ablating synapses.
Investigator
Donald B Arnold
Institute
university of southern california
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunities Number
Project Number
The advent of optogenetic tools for controlling neuronal function with light has led to dramatic
advances in the understanding of the anatomy and function of neural circuits.
Title
Prefrontal contributions to contextual representation
Investigator
Cybelle Marguerite Smith
Institute
university of pennsylvania
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunities Number
Project Number
Project Abstract/Summary
This application describes a 3-year training plan that will enable me, a cognitive neuroscientist with prior
training in electroencephalography (EEG), to conduct research on contextual memory representation using
neuroimaging (fMRI) and computational modeling.
Title
Re-engineering Connectivity in the Drosophila Brain
Investigator
Marco Gallio
Institute
northwestern university
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunities Number
Project Number
PROJECT SUMMARY
Understanding how our brain's 100 billion neurons process information to produce complex
feelings, decisions, and behaviors is a daunting task. A single neuron in the human brain may
communicate with more than a hundred thousand partners.
Title
Real-time manipulations to understand and improve memory processes
Investigator
Anna Kathleen Gillespie
Institute
university of california, san francisco
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunities Number
Project Number
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
The hippocampus is critical for capturing rich, multimodal representations of experience and facilitating
the long-term storage and later recall of these experiences.
Title
Restoring Sight to the Blind: Neural Imaging with Retinal Prostheses
Investigator
Noelle Stiles
Institute
university of southern california
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunities Number
Project Number
Project Summary – Restoring Sight to the Blind: Neural Imaging with Retinal Prostheses
Retinal prostheses restore sight to the blind by electrically stimulating still viable cells in the
retina.
Title
Significance of excitatory and inhibitory synaptic integration by interneurons for local circuit dynamics and behavior
Investigator
Brandon David Turner
Institute
duke university
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunities Number
Project Number
Localized structuring of neuronal output by inhibitory microcircuits is a fundamental component of
neuronal information processing.
Title
Sonogenetic control of neurons in a large volume of the rodent brain
Investigator
Sreekanth H. Chalasani
Institute
salk institute for biological studies
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunities Number
Project Number
Abstract
A key challenge in neuroscience is the development of methods to non-invasively manipulate specific neuronal
cell types in vivo.
Title
Streamlining Volumetric Imaging, Analysis and Publication Using Immersive Virtual Reality
Investigator
Gianfranco Doretto, Michael David Morehead, George A Spirou
Institute
istovisr
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunities Number
Project Number
Over the past 15 years, new imaging technologies and methods for high throughput imaging
have revolutionized structural biology by extending the resolution and scale of collected images
in 3 dimensions.
Title
Studying how the hippocampal-prefrontal-hypothalamic circuit encodes social dominance
Investigator
Nancy Padilla Coreano
Institute
salk institute for biological studies
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunities Number
Project Number
Project Summary
Social deficits are common in psychiatric disorders and available treatments are limited. Our lack of basic
knowledge on how the brain controls social behaviors makes it challenging to develop therapeutics for social
deficits.
Title
The behavioral microstructure of a memory-guided food-caching behavior and its relationship to hippocampal replay
Investigator
Selmaan Chettih
Institute
columbia university health sciences
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunities Number
Project Number
Project Summary
The hippocampus is a critical site for rapid memory formation and retrieval, with extensively documented
functions representing spatial and navigational variables, yet less is known of the means by which it guides
behavior.
Title
The experience of human subjects with brain organoid research
Investigator
Kate E. Macduffie
Institute
university of washington
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunities Number
Project Number
PROJECT SUMMARY
Efforts to understand the mechanisms of brain-based disease have been hindered by the limited
ability of animal models to reflect the full complexity of human brain and behavior.
Title
The neural coding of speech across human languages
Investigator
Edward Chang
Institute
university of california, san francisco
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunities Number
Project Number
PROJECT SUMMARY
The basic mechanisms underlying comprehension of spoken language are unknown. We are only beginning to
understand how the human brain extracts the most fundamental linguistic elements (consonants and vowels)
from a complex and highly variable acoustic signal.
Title
The Neuroscience of Everyday World- A novel wearable system for continuous measurement of brain function
Investigator
David A Boas, Swathi Kiran
Institute
boston university (charles river campus)
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunities Number
Project Number
Innovations in human neuroimaging tools have driven profound advances in our understanding
of brain function under well-controlled and constrained conditions.
Title
The planning of new compositional action sequences guided by interpretation of ambiguous sensory data in a novel drawing task
Investigator
Lucas Y. Tian
Institute
rockefeller university
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunities Number
Project Number
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
Animals exhibit a remarkable array of creative, adaptive, and flexible behaviors.
Title
Tracking Changes in High-Dimensional Circuit Behaviors over Long-Term Neural Recordings
Investigator
Alexander Henry Williams
Institute
stanford university
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunities Number
Project Number
Project Summary / Abstract
Recent breakthroughs in neural recording technologies suggest the possibility of understanding the
collective dynamics of large-scale brain circuits.
Title
Transgenic tools for revealing the contributions of electrical synapses to neural circuits
Investigator
Adam C Miller, John O'brien, Alberto E Pereda
Institute
albert einstein college of medicine
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunities Number
Project Number
Abstract
While current efforts in the analysis of neural circuits focus on interneuronal connectivity mediated by chemical
synapses, less is known about the contribution of electrical synapses.
Title
Traveling Wave Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation for the Control of Large-Scale Brain Networks
Investigator
Alexander Opitz
Institute
university of minnesota
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunities Number
Project Number
Abstract
Transcranial alternating current stimulation (TACS) non-invasively alters neuroelectric activity in the human
brain by applying weak, time-varying electric currents to the scalp.
Title
Two-photon Line Excitation Array Detection (2p-LEAD) microscopy for volumetric monitoring neuronal activity at 120,000 frames per second
Investigator
Adela Ben-Yakar
Institute
university of texas at austin
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunities Number
Project Number
Abstract
To understand how the brain processes information and generates behaviors, we must record neural activity of
three-dimensionally distributed circuits at millisecond timescales.
Title
Using multiple species, stimuli, and tasks to study the neural basis of visually guided behavior
Investigator
Amy Meesun Ni
Institute
university of pittsburgh at pittsburgh
Fiscal Year
Funding Opportunities Number
Project Number
Project Summary
The visual system must constantly extract behaviorally relevant stimulus information from an abundance of
irrelevant inputs from the environment, using cognitive phenomena such as attention and learning to guide this
continuously adapting process.