The demand for novel molecularly targeted drugs will continue to rise as we make progress toward personalizing cancer treatments to the molecular signatures of individual tumors. While the collection and analysis of genomic data has become routine,...
Brain tissue mechanics are an important biomarker for neurological disorders, yet methods to obtain tissue information yield inconsistent conclusions. These techniques can be invasive or require excised tissue, where tissue function is altered from...
We have a limited understanding of how an opinion is originated, how an opinion and information supporting and explaining it gets conveyed, and how the communicated opinion is perceived and processed by others. One direction of current research...
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is the leading cause of acquired disability in children, yet innate repair mechanisms are incompletely understood. A possible innate mechanism to repair injury after insult is neurogenesis - the birth, migration,...
Many organisms recognize and respond to categories: predator, prey, rival, or juvenile. Organisms recognize these ecologically-important categories by assessing diverse sensory stimuli. A primary focus of my research has been understanding how...
Cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs) and their associated cyclins are key regulators of cell cycle progression. Caenorhabditis elegans has two predicted A- type cyclins, encoded by the genes cya-1 and cya-2. Cyclin A has been shown to be required for...
Molecular optical imaging in vivo has potential for functional assessment of tumor tissue at the cellular and subcellular level. Advances in biological understanding of genomics and proteomics have increased the knowledge of possible cellular...
Prion diseases are progressive disorders that affect the central nervous system leading to memory loss, personality changes, ataxia and neurodegeneration. In humans, these disorders include Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, kuru and...
Recent years have witnessed a new class of monitoring applications that need to continuously collect information from remote data sources. Those data sources, such as web click-streams, stock quotes, and sensor data, are often characterized as...
Fluorescence molecular imaging will have an important clinical impact in the area of guided oncology surgery, where emerging technologies are poised to provide the surgeon with real-time molecular information to guide resection, using targeted...
Leukemia represents a small percentage of human cancer, accounting for about 5% of all cases of cancer in adults, but, interestingly, for about 50% of all cases of cancer in children. The behavior of leukemia is often regulated by the chromosomal...
Protein phosphorylation is an important regulatory mechanism for the control of countless processes in living systems. The delicate management of phosphate attachment to, and removal from, serine, threonine and tyrosine residues in proteins...
Gustatory pheromones regulate mating behaviors in Drosophila melanogaster and represent an important model for understanding how sensory stimuli can drive behavior. However, the genes and cells involved in pheromone detection have remained poorly...
Studies presented in this dissertation focus on the transcriptional targets and cellular functions of [Delta]Np63[alpha], the predominant TP63 isoform expressed in epithelial stem cell compartments. TP63, a member of the p53 family of...
This project focuses on the development of research tools and methods that are used to study the relationship between neural activity and subsequent hemodynamic responses in the human brain. This relationship, referred to as neurovascular coupling,...
In utero exposure to maternal malnutrition is associated with increase offspring susceptibility to cardiometabolic and neuropsychiatric disease. Epigenetic mechanisms mediate, at least in part, fetal adaptations to adverse in utero environments...
Epilepsy is associated with cognitive impairments which often manifest as a higher prevalence of memory impairments. Memory impairments in patients with epilepsy may persist even with sufficient control of seizures, suggesting other factors may...
Despite the array of targeted therapeutics that currently exist to combat breast cancer, disease progression leading to metastasis, and tumor recurrence still remains a significant clinical challenge. Efforts to identify novel pathways and...
The need for social connection is a pervasive and powerful human drive. When this fundamental need is not fulfilled, people place greater emphasis on forming social bonds and are motivated to behave in ways consistent with accomplishing these...
Yeast vacuole fusion involves three transmembrane SNAREs and a unique soluble SNARE, Vam7p. This SNARE cycles between vacuolar membrane-bound and cytosolic state. In its membrane-bound state, it is able to participate in vacuolar fusion by...
The overarching goal of this thesis was two-fold. First, to determine if the effects of chronic anabolic androgenic steroid (AAS) treatment on anxiety-like behaviors are sex-specific and second to determine how different environmental modulators...
Nerve growth factor (NGF), the prototypic neurotrophin, is well characterized for its pro-survival and growth effects in sympathetic and sensory neurons. Acting as a target-derived factor, NGF regulates the maturation of innervating neurons, and...
Although genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and other high-throughput initiatives have led to an information explosion in human genetics and genetic epidemiology, the mapping from genotype to phenotype remains challenging as most of the...
In the past few years there has been a tremendous growth in the usage of digital images. Users can now access millions of photos, a fact that poses the need of having methods that can efficiently and effectively search the visual information of...
It has been well established that physical exercise has broad impacts across the lifespan, including improved cognition, brain function, and mental health. Studies investigating the mechanism underlying the cognitive enhancing effect of exercise...
We present aligned hierarchies, a novel solution to the dimension reduction problem, representing high-dimensional and noisy sequential data as a low-dimensional object that encodes relevant information. In this thesis, we motivate our presentation...
A fundamental question in decision neuroscience is how cognitive processes underlying decision-making give rise to efficient decisions, especially in complex situations with multiple choice options, and each option consisting of multiple attributes...
In the nervous system, neuronal communication relies critically on the function of membrane ion channels. One of these is the voltage-gated sodium channel (VGSC), which is essential for the generation and propagation of action potentials in...
How is concrete conceptual information represented in the brain? Little is known about the neural organization for details of concrete objects when presented as words. The goal of the first two studies was to investigate this. In the third study,...
Visual searches for a conjunction of features (e.g., a particular combination of color and shape) are ordinarily slow and difficult. However, search efficiency for a particular conjunction can improve dramatically within a few hundred practice...
G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) make up somewhere between 30-50% of all current drug targets, yet the structural characterization of these receptors has been moderate at best. Until recently, structural data were almost nonexistent and...
From deciding what to eat first or what stock to invest in, the order in which we prefer to experience events and the amount of risk we are willing to undertake are factors that influence our choices. However, the mechanisms underlying order and...
The present thesis is focused on developing a better understanding of factors driving disease biology and overall risk using cancers of the bladder and breast as model systems. As no single approach was likely to unravel the complexities of these...
Drosophila melanogaster is a model organism often used when studying the complex processes of neuronal signaling and neurodegeneration. The short life cycle, malleable genetics, amenability to in vivo electrophysiological assays and sensitivity to...
Two experiments were designed to investigate the effects of brain damage on source monitoring. Source monitoring is the process of making decisions about the origins of memories. Previous research has demonstrated that source monitoring judgments...