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.

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.

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.

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.

December 20, 2024

Research Feature

On a biological foundation of ions and proteins, the brain forms, stores, and retrieves memories to inform intelligent behavior

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

November 21, 2024

Recent Events

At a symposium of the Simons Center for the Social Brain, six speakers described a diversity of recently launched studies aimed at improving understanding of the autistic brain.

August 14, 2024

Picower People

Two teens who spent their summer in Picower Institute labs via MIT outreach programs gained exposure to neuroscience they can carry with them to college

July 24, 2024

Research Findings

Genomics and lab studies reveal numerous findings, including a key role for Reelin amid neuronal vulnerability, and for choline and antioxidants in sustaining cognition.

July 23, 2024

Picower People

In animals from worms to humans, feelings and drives such as hunger or sleepiness influence behavior. With flexible, long-term support as a newly named HHMI Investigator, Steve Flavell will advance his lab’s studies of exactly how that happens.

July 8, 2024

Picower People

With an eye on implications for regenerative medicine, Assistant Professor Brady Weissbourd will use the support of being named a Searle Scholar to study how jellyfish excel at building and regenerating their neural networks.

July 1, 2024

Picower People

With a new Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship in Neuroscience, Assistant Professor Linlin Fan will seek to strengthen understanding of how neural connections change to encode memories of specific locations.

June 18, 2024

Picower People

As a newly named Pew Biomedical Scholar, Assistant Professor Sara Prescott and her lab plan to test whether and how neurons have a role in airway remodeling, which goes awry in many diseases.

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

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

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

From Molecules to Memory

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

New autism research projects represent a broad range of approaches to achieving a shared goal

Talented high schoolers excel while they explore the brain

Study across multiple brain regions discerns Alzheimer’s vulnerability and resilience factors

HHMI honor will advance Flavell’s studies of how internal brain states arise and affect behavior

Award will enable detailed study of an organism that constantly adds new neurons

Fellowship enables study of how the brain makes memories of places

Pew award will fund study of neural role in respiratory disease