The Department of Psychiatry and the Neuroscience Center are pleased to announce that Dr. Hiroyuki Kato will be joining the faculty at UNC in early 2017.

The UNC Neuroscience Center has also joined UNC SPARK to fund a full-time staff person and undergraduates dedicated to community outreach.

The 16th Perl/UNC Neuroscience Prize award ceremony and lecture was held on April 8th at 3PM in G202 MBRB.

In the journal Neuron, Ben Philpot, PhD, professor of cell biology and physiology, published his lab’s research analyzing the spatial determinants for UBE3A loss in the development of seizures and other hyperexcitability phenotypes in the brain

The study shows how a class of commonly used fungicides, designed to protect crops, can cause gene expression changes in mouse brain cells that look strikingly similar to changes in the brains of people with autism and Alzheimer’s disease.

Spencer Smith was awarded a Human Frontier Science Program grant for the “real-time tracking and imaging of neuronal dynamics in freely moving vertebrates.

Jason Yi, PhD, a postdoc in the Zylka lab was selected as a finalist for the SFARI Bridge to Independence Award for his proposed research project, “Inhibitory circuit dysfunction in autism spectrum disorder”.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, Janet Berrios, a graduate student in the Philpot lab, discovered that the loss of UBE3A decreases the release of the GABA neurotransmitter and alters reward-seeking behavior in an important neural pathway once presumed to be principally regulated by the dopamine neurotransmitter.

The UNC School of Medicine has awarded the 16th Perl-UNC Prize to Christopher A. Walsh, MD, PhD, Chief of the Division of Genetics and Genomics at Boston Children’s Hospital and Bullard Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology at Harvard Medical School, for the “discovery of genes and mechanisms regulating human cortical development.”

Garret Stuber publishes new review in Nature Neuroscience on the neurocircuitry of the lateral hypothalamus for feeding and reward related behaviors.