FACULTY AWARD: Bialek, Murthy, Shaevitz awarded early concept grants for brain research

By the Office of Communications on Aug. 18, 2014, 11 a.m.

Princeton faculty members William Bialek and Mala Murthy have been awarded Early Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to enable new technologies to better understand how complex behaviors emerge from the activity of brain circuits. Each award is for $300,000 over a two-year period and is part of NSF's investment in support of President Barack Obama's BRAIN Initiative. Bialek, the John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle Professor in Physics and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, received the award as prinicipal investigator in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences. Murthy, an assistant professor of molecular biology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, received the award as principal investigator in the Directorate for Biological Sciences, along with co-principal investigators Bialek and Joshua Shaevitz, an associate professor of physics and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. Thirty-six awards totaling $10.8 million were given. Most of the awarded projects involve interdisciplinary teams of investigators in support of a total of 76 researchers.

Related Stories

Murthy receives BRAIN grant to study social interactions .

Mala Murthy leads a team of researchers who are investigating how the brain processes social cues by looking at the courtship interactions of the vinegar fly.

New Princeton-CUNY program to bring together physicists and biologists .

The Center for the Physics of Biological Function, a joint endeavor between Princeton University and the City University of New York, will tackle a deceptively simple question: What does modern physics reveal about life itself?

Princeton’s John Hopfield receives Nobel Prize in physics .

Hopfield, the Howard A. Prior Professor in the Life Sciences, Emeritus, and professor of molecular biology, emeritus, shares the 2024 Nobel Prize with Toronto's Geoffrey E. Hinton.

Translating the ‘language of behavior’ with artificially intelligent motion capture .

Princeton researchers created LEAP, a flexible motion-capture tool that can be trained in a matter of minutes to track body parts over millions of frames of video with high accuracy, without any physical markers or labels.

FACULTY AWARD: Two Princeton projects among first NIH BRAIN Initiative awards .

Two Princeton University projects are among the first group of studies selected by the National Institutes of Health to receive an overall $46 million in funds related to the federal BRAIN Initiative, which aims to map the activity of all the brain's neurons.

FACULTY AWARD: Bialek receives Swartz Prize for theoretical and computational neuroscience .

William Bialek, the John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle Professor in Physics and the Lewis Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, has received the Society for Neuroscience's Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience. The $25,000 prize recognizes an individual who has produced a significant cumulative contribution to theoretical models or computational methods in neuroscience. Bialek will be presented the award Nov.

Bumblebees kept in isolation make up for it by being more social later .

Princeton researchers studied the Common Eastern Bumblebee to learn how social isolation impacts behavior and brain development.