With a storied past stretching back more than a century, the Department of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences is stepping into its future.

Creating science tools – software to sensors, models to molecules – is a powerful way Carney Institute researchers make a global impact on brain science.

Eight projects will be supported this year, with four fueling research at the Center for Alzheimer’s Disease Research. Each represents bold, promising brain science at Brown.

With the launch, Brown becomes one of a handful of U.S. universities with an undergraduate curriculum that marries neuroscience with computer science and math.

Researchers led by a team from the Carney Institute have discovered a new role for a protein that helps control muscle contractions – a finding that points to a new target for drugs that treat muscle weakening caused by aging or disease.

New faculty member Anda Chirila is no stranger to Brown. In the lab of former Carney affiliate Julie Kauer, Chirila earned a PhD studying synaptic signaling and how it contributes to pain. Now, she is advancing work she began as a postdoc at Harvard: integrating molecular-genetic tools and electrophysiology with computational, anatomical and behavioral approaches to study circuits involved in touch and pain processing.

Bess Frost, the Salame-Feraud Director of the Center for Alzheimer’s Disease Research, wins the 2025 Rainwater Prize for Innovative Early-Career Scientist.

The lab of Michael Frank has reconciled theories of how humans store and retrieve information in the short-term, a process called working memory, in a new biologically-inspired computational model. The findings have implications for dopamine-related disorders like Parkinson’s disease, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and schizophrenia.

"Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain," written by three Brown brain scientists and the first college neuroscience textbook, turns 30 this year and heads into its fifth edition. Through its 1,000-plus pages, they have taught a generation, shaped careers and college programs, and traced the arc of progress in the field.

Translational brain scientists share their research vision, and business pitches, at the economic development event.

Karla Kaun argues that addiction researchers should talk about their work in their everyday lives. Those conversations can shape how drug, tobacco and alcohol use is studied in labs, taught in schools, treated in clinics and shaped by policy. Brown addiction researchers have a track record of success in exerting the influence of evidence.

Jay Gopal is enrolled in Brown’s Program in Liberal Medical Education, which combines undergraduate and medical school education. A researcher in the Serre Lab, Gopal is creating human-aligned deep neural networks and leading the design and development of ClickMe, an object recognition game with thousands of online users who are creating a massive AI training set. He is also co-founder of a medical software startup.

Ellie Pavlick is the associate chair of the Department of Computer Science, and a Carney collaborator on artificial intelligence projects that involve natural language processing - a technology that makes chatbots possible. How language works, in humans and machines, is Pavlick's central scientific fascination.

In 2024, the Robert J. and Nancy D. Carney Institute for Brain Science faculty made major strides in research, postdocs continued to build community and new scientific leaders joined the team.

After winning a Nobel Prize, celebrated Brown physicist Leon Cooper made a big pivot from electrons to neurons and, for 40 years, galvanized the campus around brain science.

Working in fruit flies, the lab of Kate O’Connor-Giles studied a culprit causing certain intellectual disabilities - and showed that antioxidants can reverse its effects

Carney Institute affiliate Carina Curto served as a presenter and panelist at the recent BRAIN NeuroAI Workshop, making a case for using the fundamental principles of neuroscience to build better deep neural networks that run artificial intelligence systems.

Visual simulation is a form of imagination, a way to predict and plan by “seeing” future events in your mind’s eye. A team led by David Sheinberg has published new work that shows, with the strongest evidence yet, that monkeys also possess the power of visual simulation, findings that challenge our current understanding of animal cognition.