Our lab studies neurodegenerative disease in the broader context of brain development, focusing on the mechanisms of tau regulation. We take advantage of the unique physiology of the developing brain to investigate the mechanisms that may be specific to diseases such as Alzheimer's. I study the...

Every developing animal must learn to function within the context of an ever-changing body. Typically, investigations of sensorimotor development focus on waking movements. We consider another class of behavior: Twitching movements that occur exclusively during active (or REM) sleep. Twitches are...

Human frontal lobe development, structural brain imaging, the role of emotion in social behavior, conduct disorder. Recent publications

Our laboratory is interested in the link between brain structure and function across the lifespan, particularly network-based localization of neurological and psychiatric symptoms. We approach this topic using multi-modal neuroimaging methods that include lesion mapping, resting state functional...

My research focuses on characterizing the roles of genetically-defined striatal circuits in executive control. While the respective roles of striatal medium spiny neurons expressing either the dopamine receptors DRD1 or DRD2 have been extensively studied with respect to movement and reinforcement...

Sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP) is the leading cause of death in patients with intractable epilepsy, but specific mechanisms of how a seizure can cause death are poorly understood. Research efforts in my laboratory are focused on using animal models to understand the mechanisms by which...

Amanda's current research focuses on the influence of Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs), a persistent pollutant, on the adolescent brain using a rat model. She is interested in exploring environmental neurotoxicology and how environmental pollutants, toxins, or substances found in our daily...

As I begin my graduate school journey at the University of Iowa, I'm excited to learn to use single-cell RNA sequencing to address a wide range of questions in the neuroscience field. During my first rotation, I’ve explored using this technology to identify subtypes of neurons within brain regions...

Pain plays an important role in quality of life, it is something that most of the population will experience many times in their life and is one of the most common reasons why patients will visit a physician. I am interested in assessing the mechanism by which mu opioid receptor (MOR) agonists such...

The human mind is fascinating. How we think, how we remember and how our brains change over time. Underneath all these “routine” processes lies complex biological mechanisms that are constantly changing. I am interested in studying these biological mechanisms that underlie “basic” human tasks such...

Mental illnesses such as anxiety disorder are very common but have always been challenging to study because most symptoms are subjective, qualitative, and can vary widely across different individuals. The brain is also more complex than many other organs because different regions of the brain can...

Dr. Chapleau's research focuses on neural mechanisms in cardiovascular regulation; with emphasis on baroreceptor mechanosensory transduction, modulation of excitability of baroreceptor and sympathetic neurons, and determinants of baroreflex sensitivity, arterial chemoreceptor reflex sensitivity and...

Risk-perception has been studied in laboratory settings for more than a half-century. In Iowa, I study this topic in a more realistic and complicated situation: driving. I study people with focal brain lesions, people with neurodegenerative diseases, and healthy elderly people. In most of my studies...

My research project is focused on purinergic P2X and P2Y receptors in bladder sensory neurons, which are thought to play important roles in visceral pain pathway. I am using patch clamp, immunohistochemistry, and RT-PCR to study purinergic receptors function in dorsal root ganglia bladder neurons...

Dr. Inyong Choi studies neural mechanisms of auditory processing, specifically as it applies to how the human brain segregates a target sound from a mixture of interfering sounds, how the ability degrades in hearing-impaired listeners, and how hearing interventions recover such neural processes...

My main interests are in understanding the relationship between physical activity and cognitive functioning. I'd like to elucidate the mechanisms by which exercise influences neuroplasticity and how that results in observable cognitive changes. I'm particularly interested in physical activity as a...

My current research interests are in perception and attention broadly, with an emphasis on the mechanisms of visual perception, visual attention, and working-memory. More specifically, I am interested in interactions between early, low-level perceptual processing and later, high-level processes such...

Recent publications

I am interested in the brain basis of social behavior in humans. I use the lesion method to study how people form social judgments, and I am also investigating the ways in which emotion can influence other cognitive processes, such as decision-making and memory. This research attempts to understand...

We study the neural circuits and intraneuronal signaling mechanisms that regulate appetite, body weight, sleep, and cardiorespiratory function in mice and aim to understand how these regulatory processes go awry in metabolic disorders. To this end, we employee state-of-the-art neuroscience...

Dr. Curtu's research combines methods from nonlinear dynamical systems with computer simulations and statistical methods to study the dynamics of neuronal networks induced by the properties of local network components, by the properties of the coupling, by the network topology, and by the stimulus...

Research in our laboratory utilizes dynamic imaging in live brain tissue slices to study the development and remodeling of neurons and glia in the mammalian CNS. These studies address mechanisms of neural development as well as cellular responses to tissue injury. Our current projects span three...