Department News

Join the WashU Medicine Department of Neuroscience on Sept. 8-9 for the David Van Essen Symposium: Insights Into the Cortex, a tribute to the 80th birthday of Van Essen.

Jason Yi, PhD, an assistant professor of neuroscience, is acknowledged for his work with the Angelman Syndrome Foundation and his hands-on, compassionate approach to the syndrome’s community.

Christina Gurnett, MD, PhD, and Lawrence Salkoff, PhD, are lead authors on a case report that describes how Prozac can be used in the treatment of children with rare forms of epilepsy.

Study in mice shows motivation can be restored with targeted treatments.

In a study published April 11 in Science, Adam Kepecs, PhD, and other WashU Medicine researchers report they discovered a previously unrecognized pathway in the brain that senses inflammation and actively suppresses dopamine — a key driver of motivation — resulting in apathy and loss of drive.

Hysell Oviedo, PhD, has been installed as the Roger M. Perlmutter Career Development Assistant Professor of Biomedical Research.

Cheng Huang, PhD, has won a Whitehall Foundation grant to study the neural mechanisms of prediction using Drosophila (fruit flies) as a powerful model to understand analogous processes in the human brain.

Tom Franken, MD, PhD, has received a Young Investigator Grant from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) to fund a new direction in his research on the neural mechanisms of perception.

In Frontiers in Pharmacology, Lawrence Salkoff, PhD, and colleagues report how norfluoxetine, a long-lasting metabolite of fluoxetine that may accumulate in the brain at greater concentrations than fluoxetine itself in patients treated with fluoxetine, is most likely the agent bringing relief to the patients.

Zahra Dhanerawala, an MD/PhD student in the lab of Edward Han, PhD, was awarded an American Heart Association (AHA) Predoctoral Fellowship to further her research into the connection between the hippocampus and memory.

Martha Bagnall, PhD, is the principal investigator on a $5.2 million NIH grant involving collaborators at four universities.

Kristen Prufrock, PhD, was inducted Oct. 15 into the Academy of Educators at Washington University School of Medicine.

In Nature, Cheng Huang, PhD, and colleagues show that in the Drosophila brain, interconnected short- and long-term memory units of the mushroom body jointly regulate memory through dopamine signals that encode innate and learnt sensory valences.

Leandro Fosque, a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Theoretical & Computational Neuroscience (CTCN) at Washington University, has been awarded an F32 Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Individual National Research Service Award.

Dennis D.M. O’Leary, who earned his PhD in neural sciences in 1983 at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, recently passed away. 

Adam Kepecs, PhD, a professor of neuroscience and a professor of psychiatry at WashU Medicine, has been selected for a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Pioneer Award, to study how the brain’s neural circuits decode signals from the immune system and orchestrate adjustments in behavior and motivation.

WashU assistant professor of neuroscience Tom Franken and professor of physics Ralf Wessel have secured a $427,625 grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how artificial neural networks and primate brains process and predict video imagery.

A recent study published in Immunity by the Li lab opens a new chapter for the study of microglial function in development and neurodegeneration with remarkable precision.