The Society for Neuroscience has presented a Young Investigator Award to Viviana Gradinaru (BS ’05), professor of neuroscience and biological engineering, Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator, and director of the Center for Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech. The award recognizes the outstanding achievements and contributions […]

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a question asked of many children but what about stem cells? Stem cells are cells that have not yet chosen a specialized fate, such as becoming a neuron or a white blood cell. At some point, however, each stem cell does decide what it […]

Professor Yu Jintai from Fudan University-affiliated Huashan Hospital and his research team recently published a major discovery in the journal Science Advances. In research supported by TCCI®, the team discovered that the FAM171A2 gene is a key regulator of progranulin (PGRN) expression in cerebrospinal fluid and can reduce the risk of multiple neurodegenerative diseases.   […]

TCCI® researcher and President of the Chinese Sleep Research Society, Professor Huang Zhili’s research group at Huashan Hospital recently published research focused on the effect of ventral globus pallidus on wakefulness and motivational behaviors in the journal “Molecular Psychiatry.” The paper, entitled “Ventral pallidal GABAergic neurons control wakefulness associated with motivation through the ventral tegmental […]

After eating a bag of salty potato chips, you probably feel thirsty. And after a long period of exercise, you also probably feel thirsty. However, these two types of thirst are not the same. In the first example, you would likely reach for water. This is because after eating chips, the concentration of salts and […]

Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, Bren Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering is one of four Caltech faculty members to receive grants from the NIH’s High Risk, High Reward Research Program. Zernicka-Goetz, a TCCI®-affiliated faculty member, received a NIH Director’s Pioneer Award which “challenges investigators at all career levels to pursue new research directions and develop groundbreaking, high-impact […]

Like a champion fighter gaining confidence after each win, a male mouse that prevails in several successive aggressive encounters against other male mice will become even more aggressive in future encounters. This phenomenon is interesting to scientists who study behavioral neuroscience because aggression is an innate behavior in the brain.  Now a team of Caltech […]

On September 28, Professor Ying Mao, Director of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Translational Research, and Professor Cong Li from the School of Pharmacy at Fudan University, published a paper, titled ” An electric-field-responsive paramagnetic contrast agent enhances the visualization of epileptic foci in mouse models of drug-resistant epilepsy” in the journal Nature […]

Research from Viviana Gradinaru, Director of the Center for Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience, is cited in this article about dLight1, a dopamine sensor developed by Lin Tian and her team at UC Davis Health, which detects this hormone which is released by neurons to send signals to other nerve cells. When combined with advanced microscopy, […]

After a sudden fright, it’s common for your heart rate to stay elevated, your palms to stay sweaty and senses to remain alert for another threat. Mice also exhibit this response and a team of Caltech researchers wanted to learn what’s happening at a cellular level in the mouse’s brain during these persistent displays of […]