Spearheaded by Flavio Frohlich, PhD, the conference will gather the top minds in the field of neurostimulation this May in Chapel Hill. Registration is now open.

The UNC School of Medicine has awarded the 18th Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize to Winrich Freiwald, PhD, of The Rockefeller University and Doris Y. Tsao, PhD, of the California Institute of Technology for the discovery of brain mechanisms of face recognition.

Freiwald and Tsao will visit Chapel Hill on April 12 to receive the prize – a $20,000 award – and give a lecture on their work at 3 p.m. in room G202 in the Medical Biomolecular Research Building (MBRB).

Jason Stein and Hyejung Won recently published an article in Cell on the dynamic landscape of open chromatin during human neurogenesis.

In a paper published in Cell, UNC School of Medicine researchers led by Bryan Roth, MD, PhD, show how to activate only one kind of brain receptor vital for pain relief. This receptor is not involved in addiction or respiratory depression that leads to death – the most severe side effects of opioid use.

In a new study published in Cell Stem Cell, UNC School of Medicine neuroscientist Juan Song and colleagues discovered a long-distance brain circuit that controls the production of new neurons in the hippocampus. This story is featured as the Cover Story in the current issue of Cell Stem Cell.

Garret Stuber, PhD, received an NIH Merit Award for his NIH grant to study midbrain neural circuits that orchestrate cue-reward associations. Merit awards provide long-term, stable support to investigators whose research competence and productivity are distinctly superior and who are likely to continue to perform in an outstanding manner. This grant, which is funded by NIDA, provides stable support for this project for 10 years.

Anne Marion Taylor’s lab publishes in Nature Communications on the cellular mechanisms of circuit remodeling following axon damage in the mammalian central nervous system.

Anton Lab Researchers pinpoint signaling problems in the progenitor cells crucial for proper neuron generation and organization.

As part of a five-year, $7.5 million award, UNC researchers led by Joseph Piven, MD, will follow up on innovative imaging studies to create interventions to help children with autism.

The National Institute on Aging awarded a $2.6-million, five-year grant to UNC’s Mohanish Deshmukh’s lab to explore miR-29, a key molecule that helps mature brain cells avoid death.