A Team led by Martha Gillette, professor of Cell and Developmental Biology, Molecular and Integrative Physiology, Neuroscience and Bioengineering, has been awarded a BRAIN EAGER grant from NSF for a project titled “Multiscale dynamics and emergent properties of suprachiasmatic circuits in real time.”

Gillette’s project plans to bring together neuroscientists, engineers, and chemists from across campus, to develop and use newly created, complementary technologies that will non-invasively control, measure, and analyze brain network dynamics and change in real time. Their hope is to examine how neurons in the brain are activated in response to experiences, in order to see how they cause behavioral changes and subsequent activities of the neurons, also known as brain plasticity.

Gillette will work with three other faculty at the Beckman Institute: Jonathan Sweedler, professor of Chemistry, Molecular and Integrative Physiology, Neuroscience, and member in NeuroTech; Gabriel Popescu, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and member Bioimaging Science and Technology; and John Rogers, professor of Materials Science and Engineering and member in the 3D Micro- and Nanosystems Group.

“The challenge of understanding the dynamic brain—how it remembers, enables us to move or be moved, to awake and sleep each day of our lives—lies before us. The exceptional tools we will develop under the BRAIN initiative are possible because of the science and engineering innovation and the collegial spirit at Illinois. They hold tremendous promise for identifying the signatures of neural activity that generate complex behaviors, insights not previously possible,” said Gillette. “These are truly exciting times.”

Gillette’s project has an educational element: training students to merge disciplines such as neuroscience, imaging technology, engineering of new materials for electrodes, and high-resolution analysis of neuron-to-neuron signals.

The project will contribute to NSF’s growing portfolio of investments in support of President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative, a multi-agency research effort that seeks to accelerate the development of new neurotechnologies that promise to help researchers answer fundamental questions about how the brain works.

The EAGER grant is for $300,000 over a two-year period.