Denise Cai, PhD
Denise Cai, PhD, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, is the recipient of a 2019 National Institutes of Health New Innovator Award to continue her novel research into the brain and memory.
The Award was established to accelerate the pace of biomedical, behavioral, and social science discoveries by supporting exceptionally creative early-career scientists with high-impact ideas. It provides Dr. Cai with $2.5 million in funding over five years.
Dr. Cai’s research is driven by two perplexing questions: How, precisely, does the brain optimize its capacity and efficiency to store memories? And, how do these processes change over time? She and her research team will use a number of innovative approaches to further explore these concepts.
The effort includes the recording of neural activity in the brains of both younger and older study mice as they learn new spatial locations through a novel, wire-free miniature microscope known as the Miniscope system, which was co-developed with colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Icahn School of Medicine. Using this new technology, the mice will wear tiny, head-mounted, wire-free microscopes as they enter a variety of different environments, enabling researchers to record and analyze thousands of neurons over the course of time.
“We will use a variety of techniques to observe and manipulate these populations of neurons to determine how the neural activity in the brain controls the animals’ behavior,” explains Dr. Cai. “Ultimately, we aim to learn how the brain optimizes its capacity to store information across a lifetime. I am tremendously grateful to have received the New Innovator Award, which will enable our lab to explore some fundamental, yet very complex, biological questions in the field of memory and cognition.”