March 2012 – Assistant professor Spencer Smith receives a Career Development Award from the Human Frontier Science Program, an international organization funded by the governments of the G7 nations.
In the March 22nd issue of Neuron, a research article fro the Stuber lab shows that activation of VTA GABA neurons can disrupt reward-related behavior by their direct regulation of neighboring dopamine neurons.
Dr. Flavio Frohlich received the NC TraCS $5k-$50k grant entitled “Enhancing Cortical Dynamics with Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation in Humans”. NC TraCS is the academic home of the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA).
Faculty members Ben Philpot and Mark Zylka received a dual-PI R01 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to study drugs that regulate expression of Ube3a, a ubiquitin protein ligase that is mutated in Angelman syndrome
Dr. Stuber’s RO1, “Midbrain neural circuit elements that underlie cue-reward associations” was just funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. In experiments funded by this grant, we will be combining optogenetics and voltammetric techniques to determine which excitatory and inhibitory projection to the midbrain are responsible for modulating the the activity of postsynaptic dopaminergic … Read more
UNC STUDY COULD LEAD TO TREATMENT FOR ANGELMAN SYNDROME Contact: Les Lang, 919-9232563; (mobile) 919-923-2563; llang@med.unc.edu University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers used a type of drug to awaken a dormant gene in mouse neurons and in living mice, thereby identifying a potential treatment strategy for doing the same in people with Angelman’s … Read more
Newbern, a postdoc in William Snider’s lab at the UNC Neuroscience Center, has been awarded a Pathway to Independence-Career Development Award (K99/R00) by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the NIH. The award is part of an NIH-wide effort to support promising young scientists in transitioning to an independent research position. Neuroscience … Read more
Dr. Kash is one of the 94 researchers as recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers. Click here to go to the White House announcement.
The findings suggest that therapeutics targeting the path between two critical brain regions, the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens, represent potential treatments for addiction and other neuropsychiatric diseases.
Anton, a member of the Neuroscience Center at UNC and the Department of Cell and Molecular Physiology, was awarded the grant for his research in the mapping of neuronal placement in the developing cerebral cortex.