How neuroscience is forging the future of mental health care

Deep neural networks are computer models that drive today’s artificial intelligence technologies. Unpacking what’s inside these models is the focus of a growing field of research known as explainability or XAI. Explainability demystifies AI by revealing how a deep neural network model has learned to solve a given task.

For 10 years, the Zimmerman Innovation Awards in Brain Science have forged powerful science partnerships, spurred millions in funding, and–above all– supported groundbreaking science.

For nearly a decade, Diane Hoffman-Kim's lab has made cortical spheroids – basically working mini-brains.

On September 23, Edward “Ted” Huey, M.D., joined some of the nation’s leading experts on Alzheimer’s disease at the National Institute on Aging to help set research priorities and to present his work. Huey’s main message: Memory loss is not the only sign of this common and devastating disease.

Hannah Doyle, Jennifer Dumouchel, Gabriela Molica, Hasib Aamir Riaz, Max Seppo and Emma Suneby are poised to make important contributions to the study of obsessive compulsive disorder, multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and more.

Each person is just six or fewer social connections away from anyone else in the world. That’s the social psychology concept of six degrees of separation, an idea born around a century ago when telephones and airplanes dramatically shrank the distance between people — and rapidly expanded social networks.

The winners will expand upon their winning research model to address memory and epilepsy related questions.

Edward “Ted” Huey, the director of the Memory and Aging Program at Butler Hospital and a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, has been named the associate director of Brown University's Center for Alzheimer's Disease Research.

The Advancing Research Careers program awards postdoctoral scientists more than $25,000 to pilot a project independent of their home labs.

A Carney Institute faculty member has received a $100,000 prize for her work to commercialize an app to better identify and treat chronic pain.

This year’s projects span behavioral and systems neuroscience, circuit therapeutics, computation and modeling, molecular analysis, and Alzheimer’s disease research.

A collaboration between professors Michael Frank and Ellie Pavlick is yielding important results about similarities between how ChatGPT-like AI and the human brain accomplish certain complex tasks, opening the door for transformative research at the intersection of computational neuroscience and computer science.