Andrew Fox and Timothy Hanks Awarded LIAN Grant for Multidisciplinary Team Projects

(SACRAMENTO) Born with the intent of fostering interdisciplinary research, the Large Interdisciplinary Applications in Neuroscience (LIAN) Planning Grants program will support two teams led by Drs. Andrew Fox (Department of Psychology, UC Davis College of Letters and Sciences) and Timothy Hanks (Department of Neurology, School of Medicine) to pursue large collaborative federal awards with the intent to discover knowledge that will have deep impact and significance in Neuroscience.

A total of 8 proposals, which underwent a rigorous peer-reviewed, competitive process, were submitted by assembled teams including at least 3 PIs from 3 different UC Davis Schools/Colleges with synergistic expertise across species and approaches, but who had not previously submitted grant proposals as co-investigators. 

Thanks to generous financial backing of the UC Davis Office of Research and matched by the Deans of the awardees’ UC Davis Schools and Colleges, each of the two selected teams will receive up to $150,000 per year for up to two years, to assemble and submit a large interdisciplinary team-science application.

Dr. Fox’s team, which also includes Drs. Weijian Yang and Hyoyoung Jeong of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (UC Davis College of Engineering), and Dr. Christina Kim of the Department of Neurology (UC Davis School of Medicine), identified a large BRAIN Initiative award for which these LIAN planning grant will be critical in propelling them towards proposal submission. Their project entitled “Wireless Activity Dependent Tagging in the Primate Brain” will combine expertise from Drs. Yang and Jeong (photostimulation and wireless engineering), Dr. Kim (synthetic biology for neuroscience), together with Dr. Fox (primate neuroscience) and employ newly developed technologies, to interrogate circuits in the primate brain. This proposal will overcome critical technical barriers and is expected to provide breakthroughs in naturalistic primate neural imaging, with the ultimate goal of understanding brain-based disorders like Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, Anxiety and Depressive Disorders, as well as Autism Spectrum Disorder. 

The team led by Dr. Hanks, including  Dr. Xiaomo Chen (Department of Neurobiology, Physiology, & Behavior, College of Biological Sciences), Dr. Rishidev Chaudhuri (Department of Mathematics, College of Letters and Science) and Dr. Lin Tian (Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine, School of Medicine), intends to pursue a “Collaborative Program Grant for Multidisciplinary Teams” RM1 proposal through the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). Their LIAN proposal entitled “Neuromodulatory control of decision making” will determine how neuromodulation influences attention and decision making, which could ultimately provide pivotal insights into neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. The team will employ cutting edge methods for ultrafast direct measurement of neurotransmitters as well as computational models that will be used to link neuromodulatory control to alterations in neural circuit properties that explain decision making behavior. In parallel, experiments will be carried out in rodents and nonhuman primates, combining the mentioned approaches with large-scale neuronal recordings using recently developed probes to dissect circuit mechanisms of neuromodulatory control over decision making.