Behavior and Cognitive Neurosciences

The brain is an information-processing center, and this function is accomplished through distributed networks of neurons. Behavioral and cognitive neuroscience focuses on asking fundamental questions that relate to the acquisition, storage, and utilization of knowledge. When one or more of these processes go awry, they result in neurological conditions that affect functioning in these 3 domains. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that psychiatric disorders are the most expensive of all health problems. According to the National Institute of Mental Health (2015), psychiatric illness affects 1 in 5 Americans, with at least 6% of these individuals suffering from serious disability. The faculty members at the University of Minnesota who do research in this area have devoted significant efforts in order to understand, prevent, and treat psychiatric illnesses. This rich and growing area of expertise in the Graduate Program of Neuroscience has over 35 faculty members working to understand these complex brain processes.

Specific research areas include: interactions between multiple learning systems and dynamics of neural ensembles; brain control of decision making; cortical processing within local cortical regions and how these local circuits give rise to function; motor learning and its neural basis; neural control of complex spatial-temporal sequential behavior; biological processes underlying learning and memory; understanding psychopathology, and neural substrates of fear; learning and memory as they relate to visually guided behaviors; molecular biological control of memory loss in prion and Alzheimer’s diseases; small molecule control of energy homeostasis and obesity; the role of hormones and the neuroimmune system in understanding chronic pain; population encoding for planning and control of movements; neural mechanisms of motor pattern generation; multimodal neuroimaging to study sensory, motor, and cognitive brain function; neural control of decision making; molecular basis of behavior in normal and in affective disorders; how disruptions of brain connectivity influence the pathophysiology, prognosis, and treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders; magnetoencephalography (MEG) to understand long term learning and systems-level brain function; brain-machine interfaces to understand neural communication; development and generation of motor behaviors in simple invertebrate and vertebrate systems; understanding hormone and neuronal control of normal and pathological behaviors including depression, motivation, and addiction; neurotrophic factor control of neurodevelopment and function; functional architecture of the brain as it relates to neural network dysfunction in psychiatric disorders; neural networks that control movement production; energy and substrate utilization in the developing brain; integration of visual, haptic, and motor information during perception and action; dysregulation of cell excitability as it relates to neuropsychiatric disorders; and the novel use of high field magnetic resonance (fMRI) to investigate brain function in real time.

 

Faculty

Students

Bagrat Amirikian

Dieter Brandner

Alfonso Araque

Adrine Kocharan

James Ashe

Roberto Lopez Cervera

Karen Hsiao Ashe

Brian Trieu

Clark Chen  

Timothy Ebner

 

Jed Elison

 

Damien Fair  
Geoff Ghose  
Bernadette Gillick  
Paloma Gonzalez-Bellido  

Nicola Grissom

 

Stephanie Groman  
Arif Hamid  

Benjamin Hayden

 

Sheng He

 

Sarah Heilbronner

 

Suma Jacob  

Kendrick Kay

 

Daniel Kersten

 

Anna Lee    
Gordon Legge  
Julia Lemos  
Danni Li  
Hubert Lim  
Kelvin Lim  
Shmuel Lissek

 

Angus MacDonald

 

Mark Masino

 

Robert Meisel

 

Paul Mermelstein

Thomas Naselaris

Theoden Netoff

 
Jessica Nielson  

Cheryl Olman

 

Jose Pardo

 

Giuseppe Pellizzer

 

Raghu Rao

 

A. David Redish

Jocelyn Richard

 

Patrick Rothwell

 

Ben Saunders

 
Michael-Paul Schallmo  

Paul Schrater

 
Audrey Sederberg  

Francis Shen

 
Lauren Slosky  

Sade Spencer

 
Scott Sponheim  
Kamil Ugurbil  

Sophia Vinogradov

 
Jerrold Vitek  

Trevor Wardill

Kevin Wickman

 

Alik Widge

 
Yi-Mei Yang
Anna Zilverstand
Jan Zimmermann