Caltech Professor and TerraSwarm PI recipient of NIH BRAINS Grant

PASADENA NOW reports on NIH Grants awarded to 5 CalTech faculty for 3 projects aimed at identifying all cell types in the mouse brain, understanding how the brain heals itself after disease or injury, and understanding the neural circuits of behavior.

As one of the 5 Caltech researchers to receive grants from the National Institutes of Health's Brains Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, Professor Richard Murray, along with Professor Michael Dickinson, will concentrate their research on the NIH project ""A brain circuit program for understanding the sensorimotor basis of behavior".

Professor Murray, a co-principal investigator, has collaborated extensively with Dickinson on modeling and analyzing the biological systems of insect flight control.

"The collective expertise of these research teams spans the entire nervous system, from the sensory periphery to the motor periphery, and it includes experts in every experimental technique we require--molecular genetics, electrophysiology, optical imaging, biomechanics, quantitative behavioral analysis, control theory, and dynamic network theory," says Murray. "We will exploit mathematical approaches--control theory and dynamic network theory in particular--that are well suited to model feedback and the flow of information through and among different processing stages in the brain."

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