IBACS Seed Grants provide funding for collaborative research projects across the brain and cognitive sciences. Seed Grants also support applications for equipment, research workshops, events, and other activities compatible with the mission of the Institute.
2024-2025 Recipients
Learn about the PIs and projects that received IBACS Seed Grants this year.
Arielle Keller, Psychological Sciences
Title of Project: Investigating Attention in Mental Disorders with Personalized Neuroscience
Attention allows our brains to focus on important information amid abundant distractions, and attention impairments can be debilitating for daily living. We aim to understand how attention differs in young adults experiencing depression or anxiety. Participants will complete several attentionally-demanding tasks while undergoing brain scanning. We will identify links between the unique features of each person’s brain and their attention abilities to improve our understanding of attention in mental disorders and inform future treatment development.
Diane Lillo-Martin, Linguistics
Title of Project: Sign Language Annotation, Archiving, and Sharing (SLAASh)
The goals of the SLAASh project are to promote and expand scientific research on sign languages by sharing video data from signers along with metadata, annotations, and other textual materials to make the video data computationally searchable. The funded project focuses on activities associated with moving the ASL Signbank to UConn, expanding the capabilities of the database, and preparing for sharing materials with other researchers.
Tasso Tzingounis, Physiology & Neurobiology
Title of Project: KCNQ2 encephalopathy variants lead to global changes to the cortical phosphoproteome.
This project seeks to identify biological markers of KCNQ2 encephalopathy, a brain disorder linked to epilepsy, autism, and intellectual disabilities. As a common genetic cause of early-life epilepsy, KCNQ2 is frequently detected in genetic testing for children. Using advanced protein analysis techniques, the research will investigate how the disorder alters protein modifications in the brain. Aligned with IBACs' mission, the project explores how changes in brain cell activity during development shape the brain's structure and function.
Stefanie Acevedo, Music Theory
Title of Project: Effects of athletic and musical training on synchronization in Javanese gamelan musical performance
Our research uses motion capture, EMG sensors, and behavioral experimentation to study sensorimotor synchronization during Javanese Gamelan performance, an Indonesian musical practice that is known for its “playability” by individuals with various levels of expertise. Javanese Gamelan represents a rich and complex social coordination phenomenon, and performances can involve multiple musicians coordinating complex nested rhythms. Due to the nature of musical performance, we hypothesize that both musical training and athletic training (understood as a type of temporally-mediated motor training) will influence the ability of subjects to synchronize in this musical environment.
Erika Skoe, Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences
Title of Project: The confluence of musical training and noise exposure on the aging brain and body
Not everyone ages at the same rate. Some populations face more pronounced age-related health deterioration form the accumulated impact of disease and life stressors, while in others, biological aging occurs at a slower pace. We plan to use this project to develop proof-of-concept data on biological markers of aging using neuroimaging markers of brain age, in combination with an assay of biochemical and genetic markers of biological aging. We focus on two modifiable risk factors for biological aging: one with claimed protective properties (musical training) and the other with deleterious properties (noise exposure). The significance of this line of work lies in its potential to deepen our understanding of the modifiable risk factors to healthy aging.
Katarina Millicevic, UCH Neuroscience
Title of Project: Understanding Early Brain Changes in Alzheimer's Disease
Alzheimer’s disease becomes irreversible after neurotoxic protein plaques accumulate. Early detection of subtle neuronal dysfunctions preceding plaque formation is essential. Evidence indicates that disruptions in neuronal communication—electrical signaling, synaptic potentials, and glutamate handling—occur early. Our study integrates measurements of amyloid‑β load, synaptic voltages, glutamate transients, and proteomic changes to develop an assay for early dysfunction detection, advancing diagnostics and enabling timely, effective interventions before irreversible damage ensues.
Jim Magnuson, Psychological Sciences
Title of Project: Intermediate Language Models for modeling human language development, processing, and disorders
TBD
Wenrui Li, Statistics
Title of Project: Network-guided learning methods for advancing functional brain data analysis in Alzheimer’s disease research
Analysis of functional brain data, such as fMRI data, offers great promise for aiding in diagnosing Alzheimer's disease (AD) and its stages. Incorporation of brain network when analyzing functional brain data has the potential to improve the power of identifying important neuroimaging signatures for early detection, disease progression, and treatment response. This project aims to develop novel brain network-guided learning methods to predict the cognitive performance and detect neuroimaging signatures associated with AD.
Eiling Yee, Psychological Sciences
Title of Project: How the Brain Encodes Conceptual Similarity Across Object Features
Concepts allow us to interact effectively with the world by enabling us to communicate, categorize and make predictions about new experiences based on their similarity to things we already know. We aim to characterize, using fMRI, which brain areas encode conceptual similarity along features important for this critical function, like the actions we take with objects, or their typical color or shape. This finding may inform future interventions in conditions where conceptual knowledge is disrupted.
Greg Sartor, Pharmacy
Title of Project: The impact of opioid withdrawal on effort-based decision making
TBD
Sudha Srinivasan, Kinesiology
Title of Project: Changes in neural biomarkers following play-based upper extremity (UE) training in children with Unilateral Cerebral Palsy (UCP)
TBD
Whit Tabor, Psychological Sciences
Title of Project: Using Linguistic Theory to Design Efficient, Interpretable Large Language Models
TBD
Scott Rich, Physiology and Neurobiology
Title of Project: Deciphering the mechanism of action of Vagus Nerve Stimulation in post-stroke rehabilitation
Despite the efficacy of vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) in improving post-stroke motor rehabilitation, there is limited understanding of the precise mechanism by which these therapeutic effects are achieved. Such knowledge is crucial to design treatment protocols optimized specifically for this setting. This research endeavors to derive such mechanisms using a combination of novel clinical data and computational modeling, precisely tracing how VNS modulated brain activity relevant to motor rehabilitation.
Xingche Guo, Statistics
Title of Project: Integrative Modeling of Human Reward-Based Decision-Making in Behavioral Tasks
Human behavioral tasks reveal human decision processes, but studies focusing on a single task/study often miss the complexity and diversity of how people decide. This project combines data from multiple tasks and studies to address these gaps. By pooling diverse data, we will build a framework that captures varied decision strategies, improving prediction accuracy and broad applicability. Our work will deepen understanding of decision‑making and enhance mental health assessment.