What use is worry? Psychologist explains anxiety’s pros and cons
Excessive worry about COVID-19 is becoming a mental health pandemic unto itself. But when is anxiety useful, and when is it destructive? At UC Berkeley, Sonia Bishop, associate professor of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, has studied anxiety and how it affects decision-making. Among other discoveries, Bishop’s research has found that anxious people make worse decisions amid […]
Knight awarded the 2020 Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists
The SEP awards the Howard Crosby Warren Medal annually for outstanding achievement in Experimental Psychology in the United States and Canada. The 2020 Howard Crosby Warren Medal is presented to: Robert T. Knight – University of California, Berkeley Citation: for his pioneering methodological and empirical contributions to our understanding of the neural mechanisms of human […]
Feller receives 2020 Distinguished Teaching Award
MCB Professor of Neurobiology, Executive Director of the Miller Institute and member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute Marla Feller, has been honored with a UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award. The award recognizes individual faculty or instructors for sustained performance of excellence in teaching that incites intellectual curiosity in students, inspires departmental colleagues, and makes students aware […]
High-speed microscope captures fleeting brain signals
Electrical and chemical signals flash through our brains constantly as we move through the world, but it would take a high-speed camera and a window into the brain to capture their fleeting paths. University of California, Berkeley, investigators have now built such a camera: a microscope that can image the brain of an alert mouse […]
HWNI faculty to receive Weill Neurohub funding for foundational projects
Weill Neurohub is supporting five inaugural high-impact neuroscience projects. A pioneering research network, the Weill Neurohub unites three premier West Coast public universities to advance treatments for brain diseases. This initial project funding will support the development of foundational platforms and tools in four priority areas – imaging, genomics and molecular therapies, computation and data […]
How joy and wide-ranging curiosity leads to neurobiology tools for new types of questions
“I’m basically a microscopist who wants to be a neurobiologist,” says Na Ji from the University of California, Berkeley (UCB). It makes her happy when neurobiology colleagues tell her she is already one of them. Ji designs and develops tools for experimental neurobiologists that do not require a physics PhD to operate and maintain them, […]
2020 Call for Proposals: Rennie Fund for the Study of Epilepsy
The Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute (HWNI) calls for proposals to the Rennie Fund. This fund provides 1-year awards to support new research on epilepsy. Proposals can be directly related to epilepsy, or to closely related areas in neuroscience. The funding amount is in the range of $20-50K, for 1 year of support, for a single […]
Brain cells protect muscles from wasting away
While many of us worry about proteins aggregating in our brains as we age and potentially causing Alzheimer’s disease or other types of neurodegeneration, we may not realize that some of the same proteins are aggregating in our muscles, setting us up for muscle atrophy in old age. University of California, Berkeley, scientists have now […]