Recent Lab News
Acquired Funding for New DARPA Project
4/26/17
Karim Oweiss, Ph.D., professor of electrical and computer engineering, biomedical engineering and neuroscience, receives a $4.2M award from DARPA to elucidate mechanisms of brain plasticity at exceedingly high temporal and spatial resolutions. His team will first use fluorescent calcium imaging to map the functional circuitry in the prefrontal cortex - the executive control center of the brain – that mediate learning cue salience and working memory formation during auditory discrimination and decision making tasks. He will then use optogenetic interrogation — a technique to drive neurons to fire or go silent in response to targeted illumination – to study the causal involvement of specific cell types, their connectivity patterns and any associated changes reminiscent of neuroplasticity in this process.
Dr. Oweiss’s team also seeks to demonstrate the effects of peripheral nerve stimulation on cognitive-skill learning, as well as optimize the vagal electrical stimulation parameters and behavioral training protocols for long-term retention of those skills. “We want to see if it’s possible to promote targeted changes in specific brain circuits to accelerate this process by tickling the vagus nerve, which sends almost close to 80% of its output back to the brain” Oweiss said. “So if one knows that ‘brain area A’ talks to ‘brain area B’ when learning a new language, can we develop training protocols that promote the exchange between these two areas while leaving other areas unaltered? Then the person will learn at a faster rate and retain the skills for much longer.”
Announcement from DARPA's website:
www.darpa.mil/news-events/2017-04-26
Story from UF's website:
Courtesy of DARPA
Welcome New Lab Members!
4/26/17
We are pleased to welcome Narayan Subramanian, PhD, and Ali Mohammed, PhD, to the Oweiss lab! Be sure to check out their bios on the Members page.