Born in Danville, a small town in Southern Virginia, to Canadian parents of Greek heritage, Dr. Economo moved to Durham, North Carolina, during his teenage years, a move that ultimately placed him on his academic journey. Dr. Economo was surrounded by a significant scientific and academic community. He attended Duke as an undergraduate, earning […]
Assistant Professor Heidi Meyer, Psychological & Brain Sciences (College of Arts & Sciences), explores how safety learning shapes the adolescent brain Neuroscience wasn’t where Heidi Meyer expected to land. Born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska, she was drawn early on to big questions about being human: What makes us who we are? Why do we […]
Brains are composed of cell types that perform different roles in computation and are differentially affected by certain psychiatric disorders or drugs. Without a deep understanding of how cell types orchestrate the overall activity patterns, we cannot develop the next generation of therapies.
In a study that looked at the bird’s brain in unprecedented detail, researchers at Boston University uncovered new insights into a mechanism known as neurogenesis—the birth, migration, and maturation of neurons—that may help the brain learn, add new skills, and restore and repair itself.
Alice Cronin-Golomb’s research addresses diseases of aging, while Plamen Ch. Ivanov is mapping the interactions between diverse organ systems in the body; both have been honored as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
A Boston University-led research team has discovered a dopamine signal in the brain that helps determine whether you are moving toward or away from a goal potentially shedding new light on how the brain uses visual information to guide behavior. The study recently published in Nature examined behavior in mice to show that when they encounter visual cues, dopamine in the striatum located in the basal […]
More than 55 million people worldwide live with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. About 2% have a rare, inherited form that can appear as early as a person’s 30s — and like all forms of Alzheimer’s, it has no cure. For more than two decades, Boston University researcher Yakeel Quiroz has been working to uncover the genetic […]
Imagine you’re trying to have a conversation with a friend at a loud party. To pick out what they’re saying, your brain has to focus on their voice and filter out all the other party sounds—the chatter, the music. That’s the cocktail party problem: the challenge of isolating a single sound in a noisy environment. […]