Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system, its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developmental biology, cytology, psychology, physics, computer science, chemistry, medicine, statistics, and mathematical modeling to understand the fundamental and emergent properties of neurons, glia and neural circuits. The understanding of the biological basis of learning, memory, behavior, perception, and consciousness has been described by Eric Kandel as the "epic challenge" of the biological sciences.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to neuroscience:
A neuroscientist is a scientist who has specialised knowledge in neuroscience, a branch of biology that deals with the physiology, biochemistry, psychology, anatomy and molecular biology of neurons, neural circuits, and glial cells and especially their behavioral, biological, and psychological aspect in health and disease.
Brainbow is a process by which individual neurons in the brain can be distinguished from neighboring neurons using fluorescent proteins. By randomly expressing different ratios of red, green, and blue derivatives of green fluorescent protein in individual neurons, it is possible to flag each neuron with a distinctive color. This process has been a major contribution to the field of neural connectomics.
Cornelia Isabella "Cori" Bargmann is an American neurobiologist. She is known for her work on the genetic and neural circuit mechanisms of behavior using C. elegans, particularly the mechanisms of olfaction in the worm. She has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and had been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at UCSF and then Rockefeller University from 1995 to 2016. She was the Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative from 2016 to 2022. In 2012 she was awarded the $1 million Kavli Prize, and in 2013 the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
Connectomics is the production and study of connectomes: comprehensive maps of connections within an organism's nervous system. More generally, it can be thought of as the study of neuronal wiring diagrams with a focus on how structural connectivity, individual synapses, cellular morphology, and cellular ultrastructure contribute to the make up of a network. The nervous system is a network made of billions of connections and these connections are responsible for our thoughts, emotions, actions, memories, function and dysfunction. Therefore, the study of connectomics aims to advance our understanding of mental health and cognition by understanding how cells in the nervous system are connected and communicate. Because these structures are extremely complex, methods within this field use a high-throughput application of functional and structural neural imaging, most commonly magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), electron microscopy, and histological techniques in order to increase the speed, efficiency, and resolution of these nervous system maps. To date, tens of large scale datasets have been collected spanning the nervous system including the various areas of cortex, cerebellum, the retina, the peripheral nervous system and neuromuscular junctions.
Rachel Wilson is an American professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Wilson's work integrates electrophysiology, calcium imaging, molecular genetics, connectomics, computational modeling, and behavior to explore how neural circuits are organized to sense complex environments, learn associations between environmental features, and organize adaptive behavioral responses.
Ann Martin Graybiel is an Institute Professor and a faculty member in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She is an expert on the basal ganglia and the neurophysiology of habit formation, implicit learning, and her work is relevant to Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, obsessive–compulsive disorder, substance abuse and other disorders that affect the basal ganglia.
Wade G. Regehr is a Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School's Department of Neurobiology.
In the field of computational neuroscience, Brain simulation is the concept of creating a functioning computer model of a brain or part of a brain. Brain simulation projects intend to contribute to a complete understanding of the brain, and eventually also assist the process of treating and diagnosing brain diseases. Simulations utilize mathematical models of biological neurons, such as the hodgkin-huxley model, to simulate the behavior of neurons, or other cells within the brain.
Gerald D. Fischbach is an American neuroscientist. He received his M.D. from the Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University in 1965 before beginning his research career at the National Institutes of Health in 1966, where his research focused on the mechanisms of neuromuscular junctions. After his tenure at the National Institutes of Health, Fischbach was a professor at Harvard University Medical School from 1972 to 1981 and from 1990 to 1998 and the Washington University School of Medicine from 1981 to 1990. In 1998, he was named the director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke before becoming the Vice President and Dean of the Health and Biomedical Sciences, the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, and the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Columbia University from 2001 to 2006. Gerald Fischbach currently serves as the scientific director overseeing the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative. Throughout Fischbach's career, much of his research has focused on the formation and function of the neuromuscular junction, which stemmed from his innovative use of cell culture to study synaptic mechanisms.
A Drosophila connectome is a list of neurons in the Drosophila melanogaster nervous system, and the chemical synapses between them. The fly's nervous system consists of the brain plus the ventral nerve cord, and both are known to differ considerably between male and female. Dense connectomes have been completed for the female adult brain, the male nerve cord, and the female larval stage. The available connectomes show only chemical synapses - other forms of inter-neuron communication such as gap junctions or neuromodulators are not represented. Drosophila is the most complex creature with a connectome, which had only been previously obtained for three other simpler organisms, first C. elegans. The connectomes have been obtained by the methods of neural circuit reconstruction, which over the course of many years worked up through various subsets of the fly brain to the almost full connectomes that exist today.
Hugo J. Bellen is a professor at Baylor College of Medicine and an investigator emeritus at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute who studies genetics and neurobiology in the model organism, Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly.
Laurence Frederick Abbott is an American theoretical neuroscientist, who is currently the William Bloor Professor of Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University, where he helped create the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. He is widely regarded as one of the leaders of theoretical neuroscience, and is coauthor, along with Peter Dayan, on the first comprehensive textbook on theoretical neuroscience, which is considered to be the standard text for students and researchers entering theoretical neuroscience. He helped invent the dynamic clamp method alongside Eve Marder.
Guoping Feng is a Chinese-American neuroscientist. He is the Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and member of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad Institute. He is most notable for studying the synaptic mechanisms underlying psychiatric disease. In addition to developing many genetic-based imaging tools for the study of molecular mechanisms in the brain, he has generated and characterized rodent models of obsessive-compulsive disorder, autism spectrum disorders, and schizophrenia. Feng has also shown that some autism-like behaviors can be corrected in adult mice by manipulating the expression of the SHANK3 gene.
Patrik Verstreken is a Belgian neuroscientist, highly cited in his field. His work is focused on the function of neuronal synapses during health and neurological disease. Major contributions include identifying molecular mechanisms by which neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease spread throughout the brain and identification of new defects causing Parkinson's disease.
Mark Firman Bear is an American neuroscientist. He is currently the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a former Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator; an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and a Member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Stephen F. Heinemann (1939–2014) was a professor of neuroscience at the Salk Institute. He was an early researcher in the field of molecular neuroscience, contributing to the current knowledge of how nerves communicate with each other, and the role of neurotransmitters. Stephen Heinemann died August 6, 2014, of kidney failure.
Mala Murthy is an American neuroscientist who serves as the Director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and is the Karol and Marnie Marcin ’96 Professor of Neuroscience at Princeton University. Her work centers around how the brain extracts important information from the sensory world and utilises that information to modulate behavior in a social context. She is most known for her work in acoustic communication and song production in courting Drosophila fruit flies. Murthy and colleagues have also published an automated system for measuring animal pose in movies with one or more animal.
