Dr. Theodore Schwartz of the Department of Neurosurgery and Dr. Emre Aksay of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics have been awarded a 2014 Weill Cornell Medical College Seed Grant for their multidisciplinary research into the origination of epileptic seizures. The $100,000, one-year grant will provide initial funding for a new project that aims to establish a zebrafish model for oculomotor epilepsy, then use that model to identify how seizures start and spread in the brain.
Dr. Aksay’s previous work has used electrophysiology, optical imaging, behavioral analysis, and quantitative network modeling to understand how brain dynamics for learning and memory arise from the constitutive molecular, cellular, and synaptic components of a circuit. Dr. Schwartz’s Epilepsy Research Laboratory team has been working for more than a decade on imaging techniques that map the initiation and spread of epilepsy and help explain its neurovascular coupling mechanisms. The collaboration between the labs will permit unprecedented optical and electrophysiological examination of the brain’s relevant circuitry. Teams in the two adjacent labs have already been collaborating for several months and have generated promising preliminary data.
