The Iowa Neuroscience Institute has awarded two grants to support early-career faculty members pursuing research in fundamental brain mechanisms. Stephanie Gantz, PhD, assistant professor of molecular physiology and biophysics, and Joel Geerling, MD, PhD, assistant professor of neurology, will each receive $300,000 over two years to support their research.

Two University of Iowa faculty members have been awarded Williams-Cannon Faculty Fellowships through the Iowa Neuroscience Institute. Marie Gaine, PhD, assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences and experimental therapeutics, and Qiang (Johnson) Zhang, PhD, clinical assistant professor of neurology, will each receive $47,500 in research funding.

By building on nearly 30 years of groundbreaking research about the human brain, Iowa’s Human Brain Research Lab incorporates new and innovative techniques to study brain physiology. The lab's discoveries are paving new avenues to how researchers study brain structure and function.

UI stroke researchers led by Enrique Leira, MD, professor of neurology, and neurosurgery, and Anil Chauhan, PhD, professor of internal medicine, contributed the winning therapy in the rigorous pre-clinical Stroke Preclinical Assessment Network (SPAN) trial for testing cerebroprotective stroke treatments.

Twice exceptional youth—children who have a diagnosis of autism and who also have exceptional cognitive ability—are at increased the risk of suicidal thoughts, according to a recent study by researchers at the University of Iowa. Led by Jacob Michaelson and Lucas Casten, the study is the largest genetically informed study to date of risk factors for suicidal thoughts in autistic youth, and the first to examine the relationship between autism, exceptional cognitive ability, suicidal thoughts, and genetics across multiple large samples of children.

The Iowa Neuroscience Institute has awarded two Accelerator Grants to two interdisciplinary teams of neuroscientists and engineers for research on optical modulation of neuronal circuits and on developing ultra-high resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

After meeting the University of Iowa’s supportive community of prestigious epilepsy researchers, doctoral candidate Alex Petrucci has made great research advances in her exploration of sudden unexpected death in epilepsy.

Darcy Diesburg, who earned her PhD in Psychology from the University of Iowa in spring 2022, has been fascinated by human inhibitory control since her days as an undergraduate student at the University of Tulsa. As a graduate student working with Jan Wessel, she sought to elucidate what mechanisms underlie human inhibitory control, and why some individuals are so bad at it.

In a new study, University of Iowa researchers, led by Jason Radley, PhD, confirmed a neural circuit linking two separate regions in the brain governs how animals, including humans, react to a stressful situation. Through experiments, the researchers showed how rats responded to a threat either passively or actively—and linked each reaction to a specific pathway in the brain.