Mikail Rubinov, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, has been awarded $600,000 from the National Science Foundation to develop new computational methods for analysis of large-scale brain activity data.
The three-year project is funded by the NSF Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS). It was awarded alongside a companion project from the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF) and headed by Dr. Takashi Kawashima of the Weizmann Institute. Rubinov is Vanderbilt’s Principal Investigator on this project while Catie Chang, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and computer science, is Co-Principal Investigator.
“Ongoing changes in motivation, mood, and alertness, play an important role in healthy brain function, and are disrupted in neurological and psychiatric disorders,” Rubinov said. “The project will analyze neural circuitry that underpins these changes across behavioral states in humans and zebrafish.”
He said the multi-species approach can ultimately help infer the changes in humans noninvasively.
“In this way, the project aims to accelerate discovery of foundational aspects of brain activity and function,” Rubinov added.
The project is funded jointly by the Neural Systems Cluster in the Biological Sciences Directorate and the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems in the Computer and information Science and Engineering Directorate.
Contact: Lucas Johnson, 615-343-0137
lucas.l.johnson@vanderbilt.edu