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Corey Harwell, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, aims to create a diverse, collegial, and collaborative lab environment. Part of that stems from the influence of his own ambitious and caring mentors who supported his career step-by-step, often by sharing new research opportunities he wouldn’t have known existed. Here, he [...]

With all but a skeleton crew staying home from each lab to minimize the spread of Covid-19, scores of Picower Institute researchers are immersing themselves in the considerable amount of scientific work that can done away from the bench. With piles of data to analyze, plenty of manuscripts to write, new skills to acquire and […]

Mental Health meets foundational research at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT.

Anne Trafton | MIT News Office MIT NEWS OFFICE, How neurons lose their connections, Jan 14, 2016 Strengthening and weakening the connections between neurons, known as synapses, is vital to the brain’s development and everyday function. One way that neurons weaken their synapses is by swallowing up receptors on their surfaces that normally [...]

Researchers will advance our understanding of the human mind and discover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure neurological disorders. Today, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced the first round of Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative award recipients, including several MIT [...]

Today, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced their first round of BRAIN Initiative award recipients. Six teams and 15 researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were recipients. Elly Nedivi, Picower Institute principal investigator and professor in BCS and the Department of Biology, leads a team studying new methods [...]

A key feature of the mammalian brain is its capacity to adapt in response to experience, in part by remodeling of synaptic connections between neurons. Excitatory synapse rearrangements have been monitored in vivo by observation of dendritic spine dynamics, but lack of a vital marker for inhibitory synapses has precluded their observation. [...]

The brain adapts to the environment in part by persistently modifying and rearranging the diverse synaptic connections between neurons. These changes include strengthening or weakening existing links, as well as forming and eliminating synapses — long-term adjustments that are required for learning and memory. Since excitatory synapses on [...]

In this lecture Elly Nedivi provides an overview on the basics of brain anatomy, working her way up the spinal column to the deepest recesses of the cerebral cortex. Using vivid slides, we learn that physically distinguishable areas of the brain are responsible for specific functions, and that you can, for instance, build maps of […]