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.

Jun Yan, Statistics

Title of Project: Brain functional connectivity and Alzheimer's disease

Brain functional connectivity changes significantly from normal cognition to dementia. Early Alzheimer's disease (AD) affects brain function, making fMRI data valuable for early detection. This proposal aims to understand AD-related brain connectivity changes by: 1) Developing a deep learning framework to detect abnormal connectivity; 2) Exploring links between brain network differences and traits; and 3) Assessing connectivity changes and biomarkers. Statistical innovation will be applied to an existing dataset in collaboration with Dr. Panpan Zhang of Vanderbilt University.

Xiaojing Wang, Statistics

Title of Project: Fusion of Bayesian Statistics and Network Analytics to Understand Brain Function

Alzheimer’s disease (AD), as the leading cause of dementia, brings many challenges to quality of life and economics to the community, especially the aging community. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a promising biomarker for AD detection. In this project, we will develop novel, robust and interpretable Bayesian methods to reduce the impact of the noise on fMRI data and thus to improve the accuracy of functional brain networks learned from the data. The work will help associate the network-based predictors more precisely with cognitive biomarkers of AD and will make significant modeling advancement in AD.

Shengyun Gu, Linguistics

Title of Project: Processing iconicity: Insights from signing and non-signing minds

This study addresses two overarching questions regarding sign language linguistics and deaf cognition. First, how does the notion of iconicity (i.e., resemblance between form and meaning) possibly interact with a linguistic process called “weak hand drop” (i.e., a 1-handed realization of a 2-handed sign) in a deaf sign language? Second, whether and how deaf eyes may differ from hearing eyes in their perception of iconicity, as a result of knowing the sign language under consideration.

Flora Oswald, Psychological Sciences

Title of Project: Tracking Visual Attention to Environmental Signals of Belonging

Marginalized individuals often experience social identity threat, or concern about how they will be treated based on their marginalized identity, which is linked to downstream health disparities. Environmental cues, such as lacking representation, can activate this threat; conversely, cues indicating belonging – like a rainbow flag – can mitigate these detrimental effects. Our research uses eye-tracking technology to understand how marginalized individuals visually attend to environmental safety cues, highlighting the cognitive processing mechanisms underlying minority health disparities.

Yulia Bereshpolova and Maxim Volgusev, Psychological Sciences

Title of Project: Intracellular analysis of thalamic input to visual cortex in awake brain

Visual perception is dramatically influenced by changing level of alertness. While being awake and fully alert is optimal for vision, we still can detect and perceive visual stimuli while drifting to drowsiness and even light sleep states. The goal of our study is to understand how synaptic connections between the thalamus and cortical neurons which are responsible for mediating visual perception are changed during transition from the alert to drowsiness and light sleep and how these changes affect vision.

Xiaojing Wang, Neuroscience, UConn Health

Title of Project: Identifying the Cellular Composition of the Inferior Colliculus

The inferior colliculus (IC) is a major hub in the central auditory system and is implicated in tinnitus and speech processing difficulties. While different cell types in the IC have been identified, an un-biased approach that encompasses all cell types at once is still missing.

This project aims to establish a dataset of the cell types present in the IC of adult mice with normal hearing and after noise-induced hearing loss via single-nucleus RNA sequencing.

Brian Kelley, Neurosurgery, UConn Health

Title of Project: Neuronal Responses to Diffuse Axonal Injury

Diffuse axonal injury (DAI) is a major component of traumatic brain injury-related morbidity. Despite better understanding of DAI mechanisms, there have been minimal improvements in clinical outcomes. Recent basic science experiments show that neurons undergoing DAI within a region close to the cell body do not die. This unanticipated finding prompted the current study’s aim to determine the cellular mechanisms responsible for this observation. We anticipate our results will provide insights into this survival process.

Brittany Lee, Psychological Sciences

Title of Project: Investigating reading disability and comprehension using eye movements

Expository texts are informational texts that are particularly difficult for children to read and comprehend. They place greater cognitive demands on the reader compared to stories, making them especially challenging for children with reading disability. We will measure children's eye movements while they read different kinds of texts to better understand what makes expository comprehension so difficult for children with and without reading disability. With this knowledge, we hope to tailor reading instruction and intervention.

Mallory Perry-Eaddy, Nursing

Title of Project: Pediatric Recovery after sepSIS Treatment and the Microbiome (PERSIST-Microbiome)

Critically ill children who survive the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit are at increased risk of new cognitive dysfunction after they leave the hospital. While specific mechanisms have been considered, the underlying biological reasons are largely unknown. PERSIST-Microbiome aims to explore the potential role of the gut microbiome in critically ill children, especially those with inflammatory conditions such as sepsis and pneumonia, and their recovery after critical illness as it pertains to cognitive outcomes (i.e. gut-brain axis).

Gregory Sartor, Pharmaceutical Sciences

Title of Project: RNA-targeted Therapeutics for Substance Use Disorder

For several years, noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) have been implicated in drug use and relapse, yet ncRNA-targeted therapeutics have not advanced to clinical studies. The lack of translational progress is largely due to the poor physicochemical properties of established RNA interference approaches. Recent innovations have revealed that small molecules can selectively target ncRNAs and produce physiological effects in vivo. Here, we will test and develop novel, ncRNA-targeted small molecules for the treatment of substance use disorder.

Erika Skoe, Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences

Title of Project: COVID-19 and Central Nervous System Dysfunction

COVID-19 is a global health crisis impacting the health of millions. While some recover fully, others develop a poorly understood post-viral syndrome characterized by “brain fog.” These symptoms have raised concerns that the virus, or its sequelae, may cause enduring neurocognitive symptoms from central nervous system (CNS) damage. In collaboration with Dartmouth Medical School, this study uses central auditory testing methods to study CNs function in control and patients with Post-Acute COVID Syndrome (PACS).

Ephraim Trakhtenberg, Neuroscience, UConn Health

Title of Project: Novel mechanisms inhibiting axonal regeneration after optic nerve injury

Dr. Trakhtenberg was awarded a seed grant that will fund an exploratory research project aimed at testing a novel hypothesis regarding the molecular mechanisms which inhibit regeneration of injured axons. Axons are the connections through which neurons in the brain communicate with each other over long distances. If these axons are disrupted by trauma or stroke, they will not regenerate spontaneously. In this project we will study the mechanisms which prevent injured axons from regenerating