Vanderbilt Brain Institute

Prashant Donthamsetti has received a prestigious NIH Director’s Pioneer Award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. His project will use a new platform called Tag-Guided Drug to uncover how specific dopamine signaling proteins contribute to addiction. This work paves the way for more precise and effective addiction therapies. Read More

Vanderbilt scientists shed light on how the enteric nervous system—sometimes called the "brain" of the gut—forms and functions, offering insights that may advance treatments for gut motility disorders like irritable bowel syndrome and chronic constipation. Read More

The Vanderbilt Memory and Alzheimer’s Center has been awarded a Center of Excellence grant from the National Institutes of Health. The announcement comes nearly five years after the creation of an exploratory National Institute on Aging-funded Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, led by Angela Jefferson. Read More

Research led by Thilo Womelsdorf, professor of psychology and biomedical engineering at the Vanderbilt Brain Institute, could revolutionize how brain-computer interfaces are used to treat disorders of memory and cognition. Read More

Quynh Anh Nguyen has been awarded the highly competitive Klingenstein Fellowship in Neuroscience, a national honor that recognizes promising early-career investigators pursuing high-risk, high-reward research in the neurosciences. The fellowship will support Nguyen’s pioneering investigations into the brain’s inhibitory circuitry and its role in the development and control of epilepsy. Read More

A recent review from the pharmacology lab of Valentina Cigliola explores the remarkable regenerative capabilities of zebrafish and neonatal mice and how insights into these mechanisms could pave the way for innovative and regenerative therapies in humans suffering from spinal cord injuries or neurodegenerative diseases. Read More

Major depression is one of the most common mental disorders in the U.S. Approximately 7% (17.3 million) of American adults had at least one major depressive episode in 2017. Roughly 10 percent of the U.S. population is afflicted with major depressive disorder at any… Read More

For the nearly 30 percent of major depressive disorder patients who are resistant to treatment, ketamine provides some amount of normalcy, but it requires frequent treatment and can have side effects. Vanderbilt researchers now show in proof-of-concept experiments that it may be possible to extend ketamine’s antidepressant effect from about a week to up to two months. Read More

In a new paper postdoctoral fellow Rong Sun and members of the Qiangjun Zhou lab used cryo-electron tomography to better understand the precise structural arrangement of synapses of excitatory primary hippocampal neurons. Read More

The Vanderbilt Brain Institute’s annual Brain Blast event, held March 26 at the downtown Nashville Public Library, celebrated 25 years of discovery with a day of hands-on neuroscience activities for K–8 students and families. Read More