For all animals, sensory processing is a matter of survival. Sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing -; the coordination of these senses together helps them find food, return to shelter and escape danger. University of California San Diego Distinguished Professor of Physics and Neurobiology David Kleinfeld is a leading expert in sensory processing and mouth-face-head movements.
Through a highly competitive process, a new $21 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will allow him and a team of researchers to continue studying the coordination of multiple sensory inputs and head movements using laboratory mice and rats. The NIH's Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative supports scientific research that will uncover a new, dynamic picture of the brain showing how individual cells and complex neural circuits interact in both time and space. Kleinfeld's team was one of only a handful receiving grants from the initiative this year.
This NIH grant is a tremendous achievement that further showcases the immense talent of our faculty for groundbreaking research and collaboration across universities and disciplines. David's work will move us even closer to unlocking one of the universe's great mysteries: the brain." Chancellor Pradeep K.
Khosla, University of California San Diego Reverse engineering the brain Over a decade ago, Kleinfeld and colleagues began investigating rat whiskers -; called vibrissae -; and the underlying ne.