WPI Biomedical Engineering Professor Dirk Albrecht receives $315K National Science Foundation Award

The National Science Foundation granted WPI Biomedical Engineering Professor Dirk Albrecht a $315K award 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.