Neurosciences@Case
The Department of Neurosciences offers graduate and postdoctoral training in a wide range disciplines in modern neuroscience. The Neurosciences graduate program has a strong emphasis on cellular and molecular mechanisms that mediate the function and development of the nervous system. Training in neurobiology is provided through a combination of research, course work, and seminars.
Thesis research opportunities are available with more than 20 faculty members working in areas such as development of sensory and motor systems, regeneration, pathway-finding by axons, synaptic function and plasticity, neurotrophin gene expression and trophic regulation, aging, neuron-glial interactions, simple neural circuits and neural modeling, regulation of neurotransmitter and receptor expression and neurogenetics.
The Department of Neurosciences is currently undergoing a period of expansion and is actively recruiting new primary faculty. One feature of the Department that makes it a particularly attractive training environment is the highly interactive atmosphere, characterized by extensive collaboration among laboratories and with other departments in the University.
In the Spotlight
Roberto Fernandez Galan Awarded Sloan Research Fellowship
 | Congratulations to Roberto Fernandez Galan, Assistant Professor of Neurosciences, who has been awarded a 2009 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. Galan, who came to Case Western Reserve University last year, investigates how neurons cooperate together to generate brain rhythms and other forms of coordinated activity that emerge in neuronal networks. “This coordinated effort ultimately accounts for our behavior or at least for cognitive processes such as attention, awareness, learning and memory,” he says. Galan, who is also a scholar in the Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation Scholars Program in the Basic Sciences, adds that several pathologies are caused by, or at least related to, an abnormal coordination of neuronal activity such as epilepsy and schizophrenia. This prestigious award “supports the work of young researchers early in their academic careers, and often at pivotal stages in their work,” says Paul L. Joskow, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The fellowship is awarded to scientists, mathematicians and economists and 38 of its fellows have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in their fields. http://www.sloan.org/program |
A Message From the Chair
I just wanted to call your attention to three recent news reports of exciting research that was carried out by members of our department:
An article in Medical News Today describes work from Gary Landreth’s lab, carried out in collaboration with Mitch Watanabe in Pediatrics and Bill Snyder at UNC, that demonstrated that the absence of ERK2 in cranial neural crest cells in mice produced cardiac and canio-facial defects similar to patients with DiGeorge syndrome. Additionally human patients that are lacking a small portion of the chromosome containing this gene exhibited similar defects.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/128936.php?nfid=5375
An article, that made the front page of the Plain Dealer describes work published in The Journal of Neuroscience (J. Neurosci., Nov 2008; 28: 11862 - 11870) from the labs of Jerry Silver and Stefan Herlitze in collaboration with Ted Dick, demonstrating that virally expressed channelrhodopsin 2 can be activated by light to activate phrenic motoneurons to restore breathing in adult rats following a high spinal cord hemisection The research is also discussed in The Economist.
http://blog.cleveland.com/health/2008/11/cleveland_researchers_use_alga.html
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12592264
An article in Science News describes work from the lab of Jerry Silver that was published in The Journal of Neuroscience (J. Neurosci., 2008 Sep 17;28(38):9330-41) on the controversial topic of neuroinflammation following spinal cord injury. This article demonstrates the direct role of activated macrophages in axonal retraction by physical cell-cell interactions with injured axons.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/36506/title/Immune_cell_plays_good_cop%2C_bad_cop
Congratulations to everyone involved!
