Chen Graduate Innovator Awards 2019 - 2021

The 2019 - 2021 Chen Graduate Innovator Grant Awards are sponsored by the T&C Chen Center for Systems Neuroscience. The grants are awarded to projects which are conceived and driven by graduate students and are not an obvious extension of other research in their lab. The program is meant to fund out-of-box ideas that would not otherwise be pursued.

2021 Awards

Prashant Bhat and Isabel Goronzy, Guttman lab
Investigating nuclear compartmentalization and kinetics of RNA splicing in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Laura Luebbert, Lois lab
Biological Consequences of Electromechanical Effects in Neurons

Anand Muthusamy, Lester lab and Matthew Rosenberg, Meister lab
Ethological Drug Utility

Daniel Pollak, Meister lab
ERGo! – a citizen science initiative aimed at allowing scientific novices to make electroretinograms, thereby identifying new insect species for subsequent comparative studies of visual physiology and ecology.

Martin Tran, Elowitz lab
Lineage motifs reveal cell fate decision programs in the retina

2020 Awards

Annie Erickson, Chen Graduate Fellow and Tarun Sharma, Dickinson lab
Sensorimotor computation underlying praying mantis predatory strike

Shannon Esswein, Bjorkman lab
Evaluating temporal proteomics of Zika virus infection in neural progenitor cells using bioorthogonal non-canonical amino acid tagging

Han Kim, Parker lab
Investigating the reafferent chemosensory effects of an innate behavior

Sangjun Lee, Oka lab
Investigating the neural basis of need-free appetite

Zsofia Torok, Lois lab
The role of sleep in birdsong maintenance

2019 Awards

Jonathan D. Kenny and Koichiro Kajikawa, Siapas lab
Neural circuit dynamics during general anesthesia

Kyu Hyun Lee, Meister lab
Investigating the role of cerebellum in cognition

Guruprasad Raghavan, Thomson lab and Varun Wadia, Graduate Chen Fellow, Tsao lab
Fabricating Cortical Computers

John Thompson, Hsieh-Wilson lab and Pachter lab
SUGAR-seq: A New Technology for Simultaneous Glycan and Gene Expression Profiling at the Single-Cell Level