The National Science Foundation has awarded the University of Maryland nearly $2 million to establish a brain imaging laboratory that will put the institution in the forefront of research on children’s cognitive, social and psychological development as well as the study of learning and language in adults.
The university’s Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, or NACS, Program led the initiative to create the new Brain Imaging Center, which will bring together researchers from across campus to study the neural basis of language, emotion and thought. Distinguished university professor of human development Nathan Fox is the principal investigator of the project that involves at least half a dozen colleges and centers at Maryland. The College of Behavioral and Social Sciences will administer the $1.94 million grant announced this week.
“This is a major grant for NACS and the university, and is a good example of our faculty forming cross-disciplinary teams to tackle the most pressing scientific issues,” says Mel Bernstein, vice president for research. “The ability to monitor the brain while it is engaged in perceiving, thinking and making decisions about the external world will impact a wide range of our research efforts across the campus.”
The centerpiece of the Brain Imaging Center at Maryland will be a new functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, scanner. The 14-ton, 10-foot-long machine measures oxygenated blood flow during brain activity, compared to a traditional MRI, a technology that reveals the internal structure of the body.
The center will allow unique research to be conducted, as for example:
- examining brain activity as children learn to read and understand word meanings (by Assistant Professor Donald Bolger, human development);
- comparing the activity of different brain regions as memory develops in children (by Assistant Professor Tracy Riggins, psychology);
- discovering brain areas in children that are activated during social acceptance or rejection (by Professor Nathan Fox, human development); and
- understanding the neural basis of decision-making (by Associate Professor Michael Dougherty, psychology).
"This center will enable the University of Maryland to become a leader in the areas of cognitive and affective developmental neuroscience,” Fox says.
Linguistics Professor Colin Phillips, an expert on the brain bases of language understanding and a director of Maryland’s MEG (magnetoencephalography) brain imaging center, is excited by the opportunities that the new center will create for ‘multi-modal’ brain imaging. He says Maryland researchers will be able to make breakthroughs in understanding brain function by combining the millimeter-level location information from fMRI with the millisecond-level timing information from MEG.
Professor Robert Dooling, director of NACS, says research at the brain imaging center is expected to integrate faculty researchers from the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, the College of Chemical and Life Sciences, the College of Education, the College of Arts and Humanities, the A. James Clark School of Engineering, the School of Public Health and the College of Computer, Mathematical and Physical Sciences.
The center, which could open in a year, will also prompt the creation of courses to train faculty and graduate students to use the fMRI technology as well as a summer institute in developmental cognitive and affective neuroscience that will bring experts in imaging to the university.
