Professor Dirk Albrecht awarded $315K from the NSF

Professor Dirk Albrecht received a $315K award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for long-term brain circuit imaging with chemical and optogenetic stimulation. This project will adapt methods for precise microfluidic (chemical) and optical neural stimulation to "light-sheet" microscopy, a fast 3-dimensional imaging system that can record simultaneously from many neurons, including the whole brain of model organisms, for long periods of time.  Monitoring brain responses to targeted stimulation for hours will enable further study of neural changes over this time scale, such as mechanisms regulating neural sensitivity, excitability, adaptation, and computation and their roles in learning, sleep, and neurological disorders.