Systems Neuroscience

Picower Institute scientists seek to understand the complex circuits and processes that the brain constructs and employs so that we can perceive, learn, think, plan, and feel. To learn more about these or other areas of inquiry, select them under Research Topics and you'll find relevant Picower people, discoveries and events.

Li-Huei Tsai

Picower Professor of Neuroscience
The Tsai lab is interested in elucidating the pathogenic mechanisms underlying neurological disorders that impact learning and memory by taking a multidisciplinary approach to investigate the molecular, cellular, and circuit basis of neurodegenerative disorders.

Brady Weissbourd

Assistant Professor of Biology
Brady Weissbourd uses jellyfish to study nervous system evolution, development, regeneration, and function.

Matthew Wilson

Sherman Fairchild Professor in Neurobiology
Research in the Wilson laboratory focuses on the study of information representation across large populations of neurons in the mammalian nervous system, as well as on the mechanisms that underlie formation and maintenance of distributed memories, and the role of sleep in memory.

Connect or reject: Extensive rewiring builds binocular vision in the brain

July 1, 2025
Research Findings
A first-of-its-kind study in mice reveals that neurons add and shed synapses at a frenzied pace during development to integrate visual signals from the two eyes.

Autism advances

June 16, 2025
Research Feature
Rooted in fundamental curiosity about how the brain works, Picower scientists continue to break new ground in understanding autism and devising treatment strategies

The how and why of the brain’s division across hemispheres

May 12, 2025
Research Findings
Why does the brain split visual spatial perception between its hemispheres? A new review examines the advantages and trade-offs, and how the brain ultimately makes vision feel seamless.

Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten

April 28, 2025
Research Findings
Study shows how a dopamine circuit between two brain regions enables mice to extinguish fear after a peril has passed.

With Searle Scholar award, Fan will study serotonin role in memory

April 22, 2025
Picower People
Assistant Professor Linlin Fan will apply her lab’s precise “all-optical” techniques to study how serotonin might influence plasticity in memory, and whether psychedelics affect that.

A simple animal’s response to sickness highlights the nervous system’s surprising degrees of flexibility

April 8, 2025
Research Findings
Upon infection, the C. elegans worm reshuffles the roles of brain cells and flips the functions of some of the chemicals it uses to regulate behavior.

Molecules that fight infection also act on the brain, inducing anxiety or sociability

April 7, 2025
Research Findings
New research on a cytokine called IL-17 adds to growing evidence that immune molecules can influence behavior during illness.

From Molecules to Memory

December 20, 2024
Research Feature
On a biological foundation of ions and proteins, the brain forms, stores, and retrieves memories to inform intelligent behavior

Study suggests how the brain, with sleep, learns meaningful maps of spaces

December 10, 2024
Research Findings
Place cells are well known to encode individual locations, but new experiments and analysis indicate that stitching together a “cognitive map” of a whole environment requires a broader ensemble of cells, aided by sleep, to build a richer network over seve