MAP Collaboration Seed Grant: 2019 Recipients

From the Director, Charan Ranganath -- Dear MAP Faculty, we are embarking on the third year of the Memory and Plasticity (MAP) program at UC Davis. One of the MAP program’s most important initiatives is the seed grant competition.
 
The goal of this program is to support the collection of pilot data to stimulate new collaborations, and develop basic or translational research projects that are relevant to the study of learning and memory. This year, we received 10 proposals and were able to award two, one-year grants of $25,000 each. Each proposal was evaluated by a committee with expertise across neuroscience and psychology-- Randy O’Reilly (Psychology/CNS), Lin Tian (Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine), and Brian Wiltgen (Psychology/CNS). I sincerely appreciate the time and effort they put in to the difficult task of ranking these extremely competitive proposals. I’m pleased to announce the awards for this year’s competition:
Title: “High-dimensional distributed memory reservoirs for information maintenance and integration.” 
Principal Investigators: Rishidev Chaudhuri (Mathematics and Neurobiology, Physiology & Behavior) and Tim Hanks (Neurobiology, Physiology & Behavior)
Project summary: The PIs will test the idea that the brain creates general purpose “memory reservoirs” that simultaneously accumulate and maintain information in a diversity of formats. This newly-developed experimental paradigm will use neural circuit modeling and cutting-edge recording technology for in vivo recordings from large neural populations.
Title: “Machine-learning decoding of human memories during consolidation and recall using distributed invasive recordings.”
Principal Investigators: Karen Moxon (Biomedical Engineering) and Ignacio Saez (Neurological Surgery)
Project summary: In this project, the PIs will use intracranial electroencephalographic (iEEG) recordings in the brains of human neurosurgical epilepsy patients, and machine learning methods to decode and characterize human memory traces in hippocampal and cortical regions.
I want to express my sincere thanks to all of the applicants -- the submitted projects highlight the range of expertise, innovative ideas, and thriving culture of collaboration that has made UC Davis among the world’s most important sites for memory and plasticity research. Also, special thanks to the many sources of university support for the MAP program that made this program possible.​     - Charan Ranganath

MAP Collaboration Seed Grant: 2018 Recipients

From the Director, Charan Ranganath -- Dear MAP Faculty, this is the second year of the Memory and Plasticity (MAP) program at UC Davis, and we are excited to award our first ever faculty collaboration seed grant. We were only able to award two grants, but we were excited to see that the quality of all of the submissions were high. The proposals showcase the strong potential for interdisciplinary collaborations in the MAP community, and we hope that the seed grant program will continue to serve as a catalyst for future collaborations along these lines.
Title: “Intrinsic excitability as a substrate for learning and memory.”
Principal Investigators: John Gray (Neurology) and Brian Wiltgen (Psychology)
Project summary:  The PIs will directly manipulate the excitability of hippocampal neurons after conditioning and determine the effects on retrieval, consolidation and new learning. Importantly, they will alter excitability only in the neurons that are activated during learning (e.g. memory cells) by combining chemogenetic techniques with activity-dependent reporter mice. They predict that increases in excitability will enhance learning and memory while decreases will produce impairments.
Title: “Multiplex imaging of neuromodulatory signaling associated with memory acquisition in hippocampus.” 
Principal Investigators: Lin Tian (Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine) and Brian Wiltgen (Psychology)
Project summary: The PIs will explore the molecular basis of midbrain-hippocampus circuits by simultaneously imaging norepinephrine and dopamine release in the hippocampus during an associative learning task. Catecholamine release will be monitored as animals gradually learn that a neutral stimulus is a predictor of aversive footshock.