Eve E Marder
Brandeis University, MA·Neuroscience
Nervous systems have to keep working even when temperature, chemistry, or other conditions change. Yet individuals differ in how well their brains cope with stress.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biology
Physiology
- Topics
neural circuits
resilience
stomatogastric ganglion
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2033
What they work on
- Determine how long-term temperature acclimation affects resilience of the crab stomatogastric ganglion pyloric rhythm, a repeating motor pattern, by recording motor patterns and neuromuscular junctions across temperatures and with neuromodulators.
- Identify how extreme temperature and high potassium create hidden "cryptic" circuit states, using recordings together with gene expression and hemolymph (crab blood) composition analyses.
- Test in computational models whether neurons with multiple overlapping voltage-dependent currents are more resilient to perturbation than neurons with fewer currents.
- Characterize the response range of small reciprocally inhibitory circuit models, and use a model of homeostatic excitability tuning to test whether one perturbation changes resilience to later ones.
More about the research
Computational and experimental work shows that many different combinations of neuron and synapse properties can produce nearly the same circuit output. This raises a question: do circuits that look the same under normal conditions respond the same way when pushed? The lab studies this question with experiments in crabs and with computer models of neurons and circuits.
Why it matters
Many psychiatric and neurological disorders may reflect a loss of resilience to stress, injury, or environmental insults. Learning how neurons and circuits stay stable, and how repeated insults may build up hidden vulnerabilities, could inform understanding of why some individuals are more resilient than others. It could also help explain long-term changes in mental health.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yangyang Wang
Brandeis University, MA·Neuroscience
Identify how inhibitory neuromodulation by opioids changes the dynamics and properties of glutamatergic synapses in the preBötzinger Complex, the brainstem network that drives inhaled breaths.
Robert Carrillo
University of Chicago, IL·Neuroscience·Early-career
Test how combinations of Dpr and DIP cell surface proteins tell Drosophila motor neurons which muscles to connect to, using single-cell genetic changes in motor neurons that express six DIPs.
Michael R Koelle
Yale University, CT·Neuroscience
Test whether Gαo, a G protein that relays inhibitory signals, turns off egg-laying neurons and muscles in C. elegans. It may do so by activating a GTPase activator and a diacylglycerol kinase that end Gαq signaling. Approaches include biochemistry, genetics, calcium imaging and electrophysiology.
The school
Brandeis University: 5 labs on PI Pages, $107M a year on research, 75 research doctorates a year.
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