UNC undergraduate Austin Ludwig works at the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities to play a role in autism research he hopes will help millions of people, perhaps even his younger brother.
UNC School of Medicine research findings could lead to new drug targets for treating multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease.
With a more accurate understanding of the characteristics and function of the receptor MRGRPX2, University of North Carolina School of Medicine researchers were also able to create chemical probe that will allow them study the receptor more precisely.
On March 23, 2017 Joseph Piven, MD, director of the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities, gave an interview on his new study showing it is possible to use MRI scans to predict whether babies with autistic siblings will also develop autism.
Congratulations to Garret Stuber, PhD, on receiving more than $2 million dollars to continue his NIH-funded research studying upstream neural circuits that interface with VTA dopamine neurons to encode rewards and predictive cues.
James Otis & colleagues publish paper entitled, Prefrontal cortex output circuits guide reward seeking through divergent cue encoding, in Nature this week.
This first-of-its-kind study used MRIs to image the brains of infants, and then researchers used brain measurements and a computer algorithm to accurately predict autism before symptoms set in.
Flavio Frohlich, PhD, will be the featured scientist at next week’s Science Café at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences in downtown Raleigh.
As part of NIMH’s Experimental Therapeutics Initiative and led by Gabriel Dichter, PhD, researchers will use neuroimaging to evaluate a new treatment for decreased motivation and pleasure, symptoms that are common to many psychiatric disorders.
Garret Stuber, PhD, and his lab show that a molecularly defined subset of neurons in the anterior hypothalamus preferentially encode socially rewarding stimuli. These neurons project to and regulate the activity in midbrain dopamine neurons to enhance social motivation.