Ryan Bogdan, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences, received a two-year, $264,938 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study the effects of alcohol on the maturing brain. The study will look at genome-wide association studies to longitudinal neuroimaging studies of adolescents and young adults in order to disentangle the contributions […]

Keith Hengen, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, received a three-year $1.8 million grant to study the role of sleep and waking behavior in shaping the brain’s neural dynamics. His research will help scientists understand how sleep contributes to healthy cognition and shed light on the mechanisms by which disrupted sleep worsens neurodegenerative and mental health disorders.

Kirsten Gilbert Alberts and Emma Johnson at the School of Medicine and Keith Hengen in Arts & Sciences each received $70,000 Young Investigator grants from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, an organization that is committed to alleviating the suffering caused by mental illness by supporting research that will lead to advances and breakthroughs in scientific research.

Washington University’s Deanna Barch was among 59 women psychologists working in academia who took an empirical approach to understanding gender inequities in their field. They find some promising data, but also much work to be done.

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are developing a method to diagnose brain tumors using ultrasonic energy — and no incisions. Lead researcher Hong Chen has received $2.5 million from the NIH to pursue further study.

A neuroscientist’s arm cast led him and fellow School of Medicine researchers to find previously undetected neuronal pulses in the human brain that activate after an immobilizing illness or injury. The pulses appeared on MRI scans used to measure brain activity.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine report that specific types of retinal cells that carry the vast majority of visual signals from the human retina to the brain efficiently process and compress that information so it can be transferred. The study may advance our understanding of eye diseases involving the retina.

Washington University scientists will receive $13.7 million in additional funding for ongoing research into adolescent brain development. Their work is part of the largest long-term study of brain development ever conducted in the United States.

The interdisciplinary Division of Computational and Data Sciences, one of a few of its kind in the country, focuses on turning the computational lens on social sciences. In the new PhD program, students have two advisers, one in computer engineering and one in a social science domain from social work and public health, political science, or psychological and brain sciences.

School of Medicine researchers have mapped nine functional networks in the deep-brain structures of 10 healthy people, an accomplishment that could lead to improvements in deep-brain stimulation therapy for severe cases of Parkinson’s disease and other neurological conditions.