Several TCCI® for Neuroscience faculty members at Caltech have received grants from Merkin Institute for Translational Research to study different aspects of COVID-19. Dean Mobbs, assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience and Chen Scholar; Cindy Hagan, research assistant professor of neuroscience; and Ralph Adolphs, Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology, and director of the Caltech Brain Imaging Center, are leading projects to understand the impact of stress and isolation.
One of the other grant recipients, Matt Thomson, assistant professor of computational biology and Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator, is adapting experimental and computational approaches previously developed in his laboratory to monitor gene expression profiles and to discover potential inhibitors of so-called cytokine storms, which are severe immune reactions that can occur as a result of coronavirus infection.