Principal Investigator Mriganka Sur
Co-investigators Hiroki Sugihara , Jitendra Sharma
Project Website http://surlab.mit.edu/
The Sur laboratory studies the development, plasticity and dynamics of circuits in the cerebral cortex of the brain. The developing brain requires a genetic blueprint but is also acutely sensitive to experience and the environment. The adult brain responds to external stimuli, and modulates these responses by internal states such as attention, through dynamic changes in information transmission and processing.
Brain processing is enabled by local and long-range cortical circuits, which are wired during development by mechanisms of plasticity and change during adulthood by mechanisms of learning and memory. Abnormal wiring of synapses and circuits lies at the core of many brain disorders. The goal of our laboratory is to understand long-term plasticity and short-term dynamics in circuits of the developing and adult cortex, and utilize this understanding to discover mechanisms underlying disorders of brain development.
The laboratory studies these topics using state-of-the-art techniques. These include novel approaches for recording the activity and analyzing the structure of neurons, synapses and circuits of the cerebral cortex in vivo and in vitro, combined with molecular approaches to study cortical development and computational approaches to study information processing and dynamics.
Research is funded by grants from the BRAIN Initiative/NINDS, NEI, NIMH, NSF and the Simons Foundation.